‘Shall we wake him?’ asks Flick, cautiously. ‘It seems wrong, somehow. I know we’ve come a long way but it was different just talking. It seems wrong being here. I don’t feel like I should.’

Cordelia scratches her forearm and the scent of her fruity, floral perfume fills the small, comfortable room. This is a pleasing space in which to die. The walls are a sunshine yellow and hung with pictures of local landscapes. There is a TV mounted on a stand in the corner of the room and though the curtains are closed, the window by the far wall usually offers a view of the front garden. Cordelia would like to open the curtains. Outside, a light rain is falling from a grey-blue sky. She enjoys such weather. It reminds her of home.

‘It’s now or not at all,’ says Cordelia, quietly. ‘The nurse said if we can steer him onto the right path, all sorts of recollections might pour out. He might have fooled them into thinking he doesn’t know who he is but that’s only because they don’t know the truth of him. He’s been so many different people it’s no surprise he’s in a muddle. But here, at the end, I have a feeling the centre of him, the truth of him, will want to make itself heard.’

‘I don’t know if I want to know. Not really. Not now we’re here.’

‘We’ve waited half a bloody century, Flick.’

‘But look at him. Whoever he was, he’s not him any more. People change …’

‘We can’t make him suffer any more than he already is,’ says Cordelia, gently. ‘Whatever he can see in his dreams, he’s in his own hell. He would thank us for the reprieve.’

Flick turns to look at him. She seems to be considering her own mortality, her own mounting frailty. ‘Don’t ever let me get like that,’ she says.

‘You already are,’ says Cordy, and her face splits into a smile that her old friend shares.

They take a moment. Pause; revelling in this last, final instant in which they can still walk away. They are two figures upon a clifftop, leaning forward into the wind, held upright by a gale that could drop without warning. Then Cordelia walks to the side of the bed and leans over the decrepit figure who fits and cries and prays in his tortured sleep.

‘Wake up,’ she says, and closes her fingers around his nose, flinching a little at the contact and the pain the action causes joints. ‘We have questions. You have answers. And if you keep pretending, I’ll bury you. I’ll put you in the ground, just like the body in the blue suit.’