She laughed and stood up. I recognized her laughter too, by its sound and by her face, the way her eyes squinted, the dimples in her cheeks, her lopsided mouth. As she became serious, I took in that her eyes were blue-gray – back then, I had only registered that they were light. I saw all the wrinkles on her forehead and cheeks, her heavy eyelids, the tired skin and thinning hair. Irene had grown old, and I can’t say if I’d have recognized her had we crossed paths on the street. But like her voice and her laugh, the way she tucked her hair behind her ears, and the tilt of her head, were familiar. She had grown fuller around the waist, and I asked myself if the teenagers had seen something I hadn’t, in her hips and legs. She was wearing jeans, a T-shirt, and a plaid woollen shirt like a jacket. She had put down a bucket of fish she’d caught; I picked it up and followed her to the upper house.

As we went up, first up a path, then a wooden stairway – like the stairs from the beach up the dunes – Irene started breathing heavily. She leant on my arm and more than once had to take a break.

“Maybe I’ll move back down into the lower house,” she said, once we were inside. “It’s cold in winter, but it’s nice and cool in summer.”

“It has a stove.”

She looked at me. I didn’t know whether she was still sizing me up or was already disappointed, but I could tell what she was thinking: that lawyer can’t listen, he has to tell me I have a stove, as if I didn’t know that.

“That was a stupid thing to say.”

She smiled. “I don’t usually need to heat up here in the winter. Down there, the stone walls hold in the cold. It was a postal station, built more than a hundred years ago for the farms in the outback. The farms are long gone; the soil is poor and, one by one, the farmers gave up. The outback is now a nature reserve. I think the last mail boat came at Christmas, 1951.” The sweeping gesture of her arm encompassed the room we were standing in, the crooked door, the crooked windows, the crooked beams that carried the weight of the top floor, and the crooked stairs that led to it. “You don’t need to tell me that it will fall apart soon, I know. But that day hasn’t come just yet.”