She apologised for eating at a nursery hour. She leaned forward to sample the omelette so that it wouldn’t dribble over her dress. Something in her eyes was bright and full of life as she bustled around.

She asked him to smell whether a dressing she had opened last night was off – ‘No, I don’t think so.’

She urged him to help himself from a bowl filled with small tomatoes.

‘Tomaters!’ erupted a voice from the card table. ‘Ain’t seen a tomater since pussy pulled the fevvers out o’ the frush’s froat.’

Miranda rolled her eyes. ‘Thank you, Mother.’

She told him in a new voice, running a spatula around the rim of the pan: ‘She’s eighty-seven and has been like this for two years. She listens all day to the radio and then regurgitates some of the things she’s heard. My sister stomps off furious, trailing vapours.’

Last night, her small nieces had insisted on looking at Miranda’s wedding photographs. Her mother had flicked through them and then asked: ‘Who’s the woman in white?’

‘You just wonder what world she’s in,’ she said rather hoarsely. ‘I used to say “Basingstoke” when she repeated a story, but the train’s got stuck in the station. After not seeing Thor for a week, she didn’t remember him, and the odd thing is, nor did Thor recognise her. I’m worried she’s just circling the plughole.’

Dyer grimaced. ‘I’m sorry.’ The old lady’s reaction was similar to those his mother would give, he said.

‘Did your mother have dementia?’

‘If not, something like it.’

It had started out as Charles Bonnet syndrome, affecting her peripheral vision. ‘She’d see little fairies in the corners of her eyes, little wee people all running around through the air, and tell them to go away.’ Near the end, she behaved like this towards Dyer.

He had images of his mother, opening drawers and leaving the contents on the floor. Her lengthening ash. The glass potty under her bed. Her memories divided by flimsy partitions through which they eavesdropped on each other. She eventually was given electroconvulsive shock therapy for her depression. Close after that trotted cancer and chemo. They had kept her in hospital; Dyer visited twice a week with his father. He thought of the last occasion he saw her. Shapeless like a chair covered with a dustsheet. There were burns on her leg from a cigarette that his father had lit and which she had forgotten she was smoking. Make-up had run over her dress. She had taught French and German for twenty-seven years, and Dyer to teach himself.