‘That is not my problem.’ Vee is becoming fond of the emerald coat: the colour is good against Erica’s skin, just warm enough, just bold enough. Looking at Erica’s straight shining hair, the whiteness of her teeth, the gloss of her shoes (patent pewter brogues today, not heels), she feels coated in sweat and the grime of the night’s pain, illness clogging her pores. She could have a shower when there’s someone within earshot. That presence would make the rest of it – the undressing-dressing, the rinsing of shampoo from her hair, the first hot sting of water on her skin – bearable. It would be worth it to feel at least a little bit renewed.

‘I’m going to have a shower, and then I’ll see how I feel. I’ve been sorting through some boxes and I found photographs that you might like.’ She pauses, amends, ‘Might like to see. They’re on the table.’

Erica looks at the box the way a dog would look at a bone. But she pulls her gaze back to Vee as she stands, and asks, ‘Can I do anything? For you? You look . . . you don’t look well at all.’

‘Just be quiet,’ Vee says, and she sets off up the stairs, every step an effort.

*

Just be quiet? How much noise is one woman looking through one box of photographs likely to make? Vee should try living in a house with a toddler who has discovered what his toy hammer is for, and loves above all things his talking teddy bear.

Erica boils the kettle – that can’t be considered noisy – and takes one of four plain, bone-white, bone-china mugs from a plain white cupboard. She spoons loose-leaf tea into a glass teapot. Vee seems to live the way magazines make you believe everyone lives: her house is pale, her possessions spare and beautiful. The fridge hums as though it has been tuned. Erica thinks of her own fridge, the door covered with invitations, newsletters, bin-day and recycling reminders and Tom’s works of art, and inside crammed with half-used jars of this and that, out-of-date fruit and salad leaves turning to slime. Vee’s fridge has a carton of milk and a bottle of rum in the door; on the shelves are tomatoes, pears, fresh pasta, and a carton of clam chowder. Erica wants to worship the simplicity of it, and the lifestyle it implies. She loves her family, she really does. But oh, for the time to taste the food on your tongue. When she goes home she will get rid of all of their chipped mugs.

But now it’s time for the box. Erica tries not to think of the treasure she might find. She’s an academic. She’s an adult. She’ll wait and see.