“Please don’t keep saying that.” I lift the painting up by its frame and, taking great care, turn it to the wall. “And please don’t show this work. Even though she’s got her clothes on. I should be thankful for that, I suppose.”

I had wanted to crush him but it cost too much. When he bows his head, his hand over his eyes, I’m eviscerated all over again.

—

As I close the gate he calls to me from the doorway. “James!” A hopeless cry. “Wait.”

Bailey’s tugging. I force myself to turn around. He looks stronger to me: he’s mastered himself somehow, his face is more firmly set.

“I loved her, you know!” he bursts out.

“You loved her?” I speak very soft, winded by anger. “I doubt you knew the first thing about her.”

When I’m almost at the end of the lane, he shouts something after me but I close my ears.

—

We take the track up to the top of Beacon Hill. Bailey runs ahead, he has no idea he’ll have to walk all the way back again. The hawthorn hedges straggle to nothing as the hill rises, the fields on both sides salt-and-peppered with chalk. The cloud cover is unbroken to the horizon, motionless and iron-gray.

What would she have been wearing on her feet? She had a pair of pumps she slid on for driving, black, a bit like dancing shoes. They wouldn’t have shielded her from rough tussocks of wet grass, the slippery bare chalk. But then she was walking in the spring. It was dry. She picked her way up here without a second thought for her shoes, nimbly, like one of those deer who live on high peaks. Did she step here, or there? Her stride was shorter than mine but now and again my wet tramping boots must be crushing her footprints.

She delighted in his youth, his lanky charm, the words that came out of his mouth. Every single one of them real and true, without dissimulation. Not the polished phrases of a hollow man.

—

I climb the last few yards and it is how she described it, a strange flattish ramparted summit edged all around by humps and dips. Bailey hurries over the ground, tail up. At the southern edge I look out over the distant sea. The refinery’s visible on the coast, the chimneys very clear as is often the case with this kind of still overcast, as if each outline has been inked in. Inked in by Philip perhaps. Perhaps I’m looking back in time and all this, the chimneys, the tall blocks of the city, and the dark stain of the brick terraces of Alver Shore, is his vision. Perhaps they were sitting here a moment ago and I’ve just missed them, missed the last seconds before he kissed her.