A hand touched his shoulder. Muriel stood in front of him, wearing a tight-fitting dark green coat and hat, holding a teacup and saucer. The coat emphasised her nipped-in waist. Her complexion was even paler than usual despite the rouge on her cheeks, her eyes red-rimmed and, behind her lipsticked smile, the shadow of loss. The memory of her black-smeared face in the rain came back to him.

He half stood. ‘Muriel, I – how are you? I haven’t seen you. I heard about…’

She gave a flick of her hair and sat down opposite him. ‘It ent just us.’ She opened up her handbag and took out her cigarettes. ‘I hear your mother’s got the shop open again,’ she said.

‘I should be there now.’

‘Why aren’t you then?’

‘I can’t face it any more. Since the flood, it’s all… I don’t know, everything seems ruined.’ He drifted off, then remembered again. Little Freddie Gittings. The policeman, Blowers, had told him that the boy had been pulled out of his mother’s arms. ‘It’s not important. How – how is your family?’ He should have said that first.

She took a drag of her cigarette and blew a plume of smoke out of the corner of her mouth. ‘Mother’s not herself. She’s raving. Says all sorts. Keeps saying his name over and over again and there’s nothing any of us can do.’ Another drag. ‘She’s on some pills what the doctor brought her. They make her all funny and drowsy and she looks at us, all blank and empty, like a sort of animal that’s been stunned. Whole families’ve been coming round and bringing us scraps of food an that but she hardly notices them.’

Arthur heard the voice of Blowers saying about his aunt. Blowers was Muriel’s cousin. Of course. He’d known that. He had a sudden lurching thought that the policeman might have told Muriel about him finding Jack’s body.

She noticed him watching her and flashed him her teeth, then paused, biting her bottom lip. Without meaning to, he’d put his hand on hers. He withdrew it and, to do something, lit up one of his own fags. There was a white triangle of skin beneath her yellow scarf and above the top button of her coat. He imagined putting his lips to the soft, cold flesh, pressing his fingers down into the depths below. The image spread, filling his head, and he allowed it to, strange though it was, because it made his skin tingle and his blood pulse. Nothing had done that to him since the flood.

‘I saw you through the window and I thought – I need to say thank you for what you did,’ Muriel said.

He shook himself away from his reverie. ‘No you don’t, I didn’t do anything. I wish I had, maybe we could have avoided…’