‘Fine, thanks, Harry. It’s just been a bit chaotic at home.’

‘Send your girl my love,’ Harry says, as he always does.

He proffers my change, and I wave it away, as I always do. ‘Thank you for the shortbread,’ I say, raising it in tribute.

Harry’s smile broadens. ‘Hope she enjoys it.’

I get back on the road, sipping my coffee as the grey built-up streets give way to country roads and vivid autumn foliage. Eventually I reach the outskirts of Abingdon, securing the lid of my travel mug just before the hump-backed bridge that would have spilled it. Shortly afterwards I turn right between a pair of stone pillars onto a long, sweeping gravel drive. It’s another half-mile before the warm yellow stone of Alexander Manor comes into view.

The receptionist is new to me. I hand her my ID, and she pecks away at her computer with neatly trimmed nails: all the better to show off the small princess-cut diamond on the fourth finger of her left hand.

‘Have you been here before?’ she asks, handing me a sticky ‘V’ label.

‘Yes. I know where I’m going,’ I say.

I ascend the broad curve of stairs to the second floor. Built in the eighteenth century, Alexander Manor was once the seat of an old Sussex family that endured for seven generations before being abruptly extinguished by the First World War. Requisitioned as a military hospital in 1916, it was finally returned to civilian use in the mid-Sixties and for the last four decades has been used as a private care home. Unlike most such institutions, it smells not of pee and bleach but beeswax and history.

Coloured motes of light from the stained-glass windows dance across the oak panelling, and long-dead ancestors look down sternly from the walls.

I head down the corridor to a bright, sunny room at the end. I imagine this was once the private sitting room of the mistress of the house: I can picture her gazing from the window down the graceful curve of her drive.

Watching a boy on a bicycle bringing her a telegram telling her the last of her four sons was dead.

‘Hello, my darling girl,’ I say, as I enter the room. I hold up the paper bag containing the shortbread. ‘Look what I’ve brought for you.’

Gracie doesn’t move. I crouch beside her wheelchair, positioned near the tall window so that she can see the view, and touch her cheek so she knows I’m here. After a moment, she turns her head towards me, and I tell myself I see recognition in her eyes.

‘Here,’ I smile, breaking off a piece of shortbread and handing it to her. ‘It’s your favourite.’