SOMETIMES WHEN I arrived she’d open the front door and just stand there as if she’d hardly noticed I’d come – her arms folded beneath her breasts, watching the empty battered garment fill with the breeze from the open door, the body swelling up and moving about, as if it were alive. I wondered if she took it down at night from its curved hook, put its soft arms around her neck, its hips against her hips, and danced with it across the room and told it she loved it.

In the evenings, when I sat with her in the lamplight, I could see it out there, hanging in the passageway. The three scuffed leather buttons down one side, the nub of thick pewtery thread where a fourth had gone missing. It made me think of a roughed-up dog after a fight.

‘You should fold it away, Evangelina,’ I’d say then, as gently as I could. ‘Pack it up with your memories and put everything in a box and start again.’

When she didn’t say anything I’d reach out and cover her hand with mine.

‘Forget him, Evangelina.’

‘No.’

It was grey, a soft dark grey like old heather or the sea at Duddon in winter. Broad-shouldered and long-armed like Joseph himself. She kept it on a hook next to the front door like some kind of charm, a lure that would bring him home, like one of the lamps in the windows of the inn that were there to guide the carts and carriages safely across the bay.

It was more than a year since Joseph Hine had walked out of the door and left without a word of goodbye or explanation of any kind and Evangelina kept dreaming up all kinds of reasons why he might have gone. Once, in a flood of tears, she asked me if I thought there might be some far-off war she’d never heard of he’d felt called upon to fight; another time, if I thought it could have been something religious, some difficult question to do with his soul he’d gone away to figure out.

‘Don’t be daft,’ I wanted to say.

I don’t think it ever entered her head, what everyone thought: that her good-looking husband must have another woman somewhere, in Blackpool or Manchester or Liverpool. Somewhere glamorous and busy she’d never been, someone Joseph had met when he went off carousing three times a year with his uncles and his brothers and his sisters’ big loud-mouthed husbands.