I did my best but my best was lamentable. What she actually needed, I couldn’t give her. And now I’m being punished at last for my failure, for my confusion, for not being enough for her. For giving her a facsimile of myself while the real one struggled in darkness or rather in blinding light. Overwhelmed by cataclysm.

—

Philip Moore is living at his mother’s house in Ash Lane, a cut in the hillside off the main street of Upton, so deep and steep that there’s a high stone retaining wall at the top. The house is around the corner, the last bungalow on the left. He hasn’t given me this information but luckily I can follow the directions supplied by my dead wife, who not only told me the name of the man she kissed but the exact location of his home.

The latch of the gate is stiff, the wolf’s-head door knocker snarls at me. She wondered if it might be a dog, but I don’t think so.

Bailey barks before I can knock, making me start, because a silence seems to have descended everywhere. No living thing is here, not even a singing bird. And no sound comes from inside the house. I hush Bailey but he barks again. Now a shape appears, a darker shadow in the shade of the hallway. A lock rattles and the door is opened.

He’s barefoot, his hair tousled, a tall rangy figure in a creased shirt. As if my discovery has sent him back to the bohemian dishevelment of his youth. He pushes back his hair. Those long fingers stroked my wife’s arm no doubt, her shoulder, her neck perhaps, for in kissing people come close, they touch. Even if nothing else happened, he touched her.

“Philip,” I say, recalling from a distant yesterday that we were on first-name terms. “I’m sorry if I’ve disturbed you.”

How disingenuous. I’ve come expressly to disturb him.

“Is it about Mum?” He looks worried. “I was having a nap, I might have missed the phone . . .”

“No. I mean, I’ve heard nothing from Redwood House.”

“Maybe I should ring and check . . .”

He loiters, lost in anxiety.

“I wonder if I could come in?” I say after a moment. “I can leave my dog outside if you prefer.”

“No, bring it in. I mean, do come in. How rude of me.”

—

Bailey crosses the tiles of the kitchen floor, his claws clicking. “If you don’t mind, I’ll ring Redwood,” Philip says, and disappears into another room. Soon I hear his voice on the phone, an indistinct up-and-down murmur.

The low-silled window, the one with a garden view, is filled with a jungle of pot plants. No armchair in front of it anymore: I’m glad. I don’t have to imagine her sitting in it.

“Everything’s fine,” he says, returning to the room. “Can I get you something? Coffee?”