‘I was grateful for your reading list, incidentally.’

Dyer looked blank, before he remembered. ‘That was no trouble.’

‘Unlike the rest, you mean?’ Then quickly: ‘Shut up, mouth. Sorry, but I was always taught that the wise read a letter backwards.’

He smiled. ‘I haven’t heard that phrase since …’

‘University?’ She was breaking an egg into a bowl.

‘I expect.’

‘Were you at this place?’

‘I was.’

‘Studying?’

‘English.’

‘Ditto.’ She had stayed on to do a doctorate, on English Linguistics from 1900 to 1940.

‘I stayed on, too,’ he said, ‘for a while.’

She licked her finger. ‘Talk to me – if I start I won’t stop.’

It was only for a year, before he joined the newspaper. He tells her about it as she prepares the omelette (‘one of my specialities’). His dissertation on the one hundred and nine claimants to the authorship of the plays in the First Folio. He had used Francis Bacon’s code to prove that P. G. Wodehouse had written Love’s Labour’s Lost.

He said: ‘You can prove anyone is anyone. Is what I learned.’

She laughed. ‘Marriage taught me that. No, what am I talking about. I’m talking bollocks. Hey, Thor, down from there!’

She shooed the dog off the photographs which her young nieces had jumbled up when they came by last night; she had deposited her mother for the time she was away with her sister in Streatley, Thor with a neighbour up the road.

Photographs had spilled onto the carpet. Dyer stooped to retrieve them. One showed Miranda in a white gauze dress with a not very tall sturdy man in a suit.

‘Is that him?’

‘You monster of curiosity. Yes.’ She looked over his shoulder to refresh her memory.

Dark receding hairline, strong jaw, direct crinkly gaze. ‘He was a great flirt. He had superb eyes, they came out of his head whenever he saw a pretty woman. He left a lot of long faces when he married me.’ She hobbled back into the kitchen area. Earlier, she had kicked her suitcase under a bed, splintering a toenail.

‘Pinot?’ lifting a bottle.

‘Yes.’

‘Good. I don’t trust people who don’t drink red wine.’ She unscrewed the cap and looked for two glasses.

For seventeen years, she had ironed his shirts and made sure no dandruff was on his collar. ‘After he left, I thought I’d never be happy, but sometimes I realise when I read a book or see a sunset or hear music I am absolutely content.’

She poured the omelette mix into the heated pan. ‘Ah, that is a nice sound, that’s how it should sound, and we’ll have to eat it right away. You will stay for a bite, won’t you?’