The sound of the doorbell shocks him from his reverie: a neighbour asking whether a parcel has been delivered to Vic’s by mistake. Sadly not, Vic replies distractedly. Closing the door, he is suddenly struck with a clear sense of purpose.

It takes him half an hour to locate the car keys, but he eventually finds them under a pile of New Scientist magazines on top of the piano. He regards the neglected instrument sadly for a moment: somehow he hasn’t been able to bring himself to open it since Ella died. Even the sound of piano music on the radio brings back too many sad memories. Finally, he grabs his best camel coat and dark blue cashmere scarf – her gift on their last Christmas together – picks up the newspaper and lets himself out of the flat.

The car, an ancient Volvo, is kept in a garage down the road and hasn’t been out for several weeks. ‘Hope the battery’s still good,’ he mutters, his hand shaking as he tries to insert the key into the ignition. ‘Come on, old girl.’ After a few turns the engine groans and clatters into life, filling the garage with blue smoke.

‘Off we go, then, my friend,’ he says out loud, smiling to himself as he reverses out into the road without looking. ‘A sentimental journey indeed, Johnnie. What larks.’

He’s forgotten how far it is from London to the Suffolk coast. Lately, the furthest he has driven is to visit Ella’s cousin, who lives just outside the North Circular. In fact, he muses to himself while sitting in a traffic jam at Chelmsford, even though he has made this journey dozens of times he can barely remember ever doing it by road.

He recalls trains packed with servicemen and women, steamy, smoke-filled carriages, the smell of wet wool and unwashed feet, the air filled with nervous laughter and anxious glances, couples necking in the corridors and lavs, frantically quarrying precious final moments. When you arrived at Felixstowe station, the ancient coach – hastily hand-painted in air force blue – would grind its way down to the ferry where Charlie Brinkley waited, cap pulled down over his left eye and tiller held firmly in the hook that replaced his missing right hand.

That initial view of the Manor, high on its sandy cliffs above the junction of river and sea, was enough to lift the spirits of any weary traveller. What a view: those elegant red turrets, the stone-mullioned windows and balconies overlooking tiers of walled terraces leading down to the enormous green spread of the cricket pitch, said to be even larger than that at Lord’s.

As the traffic trickles its way through Colchester, and after what seems like several further hours in another traffic jam trying to circumvent the centre of Ipswich, he begins to fear he might not reach Felixstowe in time to catch the last ferry.