She – Vivienne – had rung his bell, which was a rare occurrence. She had apologised for disturbing him, but the blind had come off the wall and she couldn’t see to fix it. Did he mind? No, he didn’t. She hated to be a nuisance, but she wasn’t being one if only because she was giving him the chance to show how high his spirits were. She was allowing him to play the role of ‘busy man’.

‘You don’t have to come now,’ she’d said.

‘No, I’ve just got a couple of errands in town, and then I’ll be over.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Absolutely.’

The blind did not need replacing or even repairing – she had knocked it somehow, and the rail had come away from its plastic toggle. It was thirty seconds’ work to fix it, and Vivienne had been so grateful. With both his parents gone, he couldn’t phone anyone to say what he’d been up to, and how he had single-handedly reattached an elderly lady’s blind. He was orphaned, but so were most people: your parents died in the end, because that’s what parents do. They were up in heaven, no doubt, except heaven was the place nobody with a brain could possibly believe in, unless they hadn’t escaped their childhood. Why not believe in it, though? Why not take comfort? They would all meet in heaven and he could tell them his important news:

‘It was only the toggle, Dad. She’d knocked it.’

‘What kind of toggle, son?’

‘You know – one of those plastic curtain tracks. They have toggles at the back. You just have to locate it in the groove, and turn it.’

The nagging, desolate sameness: it was shaming.