‘I just hope he’s better than the last one.’

‘Yeah, that wouldn’t take much.’ She gave a little sniff and shudder, pulled the blanket round her shoulders. ‘Are you going to flip it, then, or aren’t you?’

He turned the record over, cranked the handle. ‘Now it all makes sense,’ he said, setting the stylus to the shellac till it purred. ‘No wonder you’ve been dying to post the letters every day.’

She raised her glass at him and winked. ‘Don’t breathe a word, you hear?’

‘As if I would.’ Here came the jangle of piano keys again, the bouncy clarinet. He liked this tune much better, but it didn’t last as long. The problem with a ten-inch was no sooner had the music found its energy and flow, the track was over.

‘Put that on again,’ she said, ‘before you leave.’

‘I’ll stay for a few more.’

‘Good lad.’

He had a shuffle through the Mayhoods’ stack of records on the shelf. ‘What do you want to hear?’

‘Anything but Florrie Forde.’

‘Let’s see … The Andrews Sisters?’

‘They’ll do fine.’

He put on ‘Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy’ and, after that, the B-side. While the music played, she sank into the sofa cushions with the whisky tumbler on her chest. She kept her eyelids shut and her feet dancing. Once or twice, she angled her head forward for another slurp. If she was sweet on someone and the feeling wasn’t mutual, then maybe it accounted for her moods of late: her sullenness and sleeplessness, not to mention all the grief she’d given him about his pining over Florence, which he’d thought a bit extreme. Now he knew. She’d been distracting his attention from the stink of her own heartache. With his sister, there was always more to every story than she let you hear. She’d been wounded by someone, that much he understood. He’d have to drop into the post office tomorrow, have a good look at this fella she was smitten with. Joyce’s heart was a grenade – there weren’t too many he would trust with it. The last thing either of them needed was another chancer rattling through her life and disappearing.