It was dark in the entrance hall; however much I widened my eyes and peered, I could barely see the chequered floor at my feet.

“Over there,” she breathed, indicating another door, and we hobbled toward it, my wet pumps squeaking and squelching on the tiles. She hung off my arm, fluttering like a chrysalis on the cusp of disintegration.

“Here,” she said. “In here.”

The blinds were half drawn on one window and fully drawn on the other, but I could see well enough to help her to the sofa. She eased her shoes off and lay down with a graceful stiffness, like an aged cat. Not that she was old. Sixty? Sixty-five? Perhaps less. It was pain, not age, that defined her face and body—not just fleetingly, on the surface, but deep down in the sharpness of her bones, and the hang of her flesh, and the heaviness of her eyelids.

“Water,” she said, closing her eyes, and I rummaged for the bottle in my handbag.

I know I’d been fantasising about large, empty spaces, but I was shocked by the bareness of this room. There was none of the usual stately home stuff that you see in museums—no family portraits, no matching sets of leather-bound books, no pianoforte. Aside from the sofa there was nothing at all, although you could see where things used to be. It was as if the place had been plundered. There were bleached patches on the peeling pink walls where paintings used to hang, and grubby marks where the backs of armchairs used to press, and unvarnished floorboards where there used to be carpets. Cobwebs dangled from the light fittings and swung in the draught from the door. I shivered as the blinds darkened and the rain came on more heavily than before.

The woman squeezed a pill from a foil strip and gulped it down before fishing a tissue out of her sleeve and scrunching it against the moist corners of her mouth. She pressed hard, but it didn’t stop her hand from shaking.

“Shall I get you some more water?”

She shook her head, angling her body away from me as if my presence oppressed her. I moved back into the shadows at the corner of the room.

“Go home now,” she said, fixing her eyes on the tissue as she stroked it flat across her lap. “I don’t care who you are, or why you think you ought to be here, or any of that. I don’t care if you think I’m being rude, there isn’t time—”

A bang made us both jump. I knew it was the front door flying open, because the draught made our own door drift ajar, and the sitting room was suddenly alive with the chilly scents and sounds of the outside. The woman stopped speaking abruptly and forgot to close her mouth.

“Darling!” she said as the man came in, dropping his bags in the doorway. Her tone was difficult to interpret: it may have implied relief, or enthusiasm, or fear, or an uneasy fusion of all three. She tried to rise from the sofa, but he placed his hand on her shoulder so that she wouldn’t get up.