Now the legal matters relating to his father’s death the previous winter had been finalised, Bob, with four or five dollops of luck and an immense amount of effort, had been able to buy the house by the river. To scrape the last bit of funds for his deposit, he had sold his furniture, his car and his record collection. Getting to the college to teach his class meant an hour’s walk and a half an hour bus ride. For extra money, he took a job helping out at a woodyard, which was also not a short walk away, and felt like work more suited to someone two decades his junior, but he enjoyed its noises and smells, and it came with the advantage of free firewood. The first time Sally came over to the river house, they ate risotto beside the crackling logs, he squatting on the floor and she on a large cushion next to an ancient hi-fi unit. She heard a discrepancy in the toner arm of the deck and adjusted it. ‘I think I might be becoming an interior decor commitmentphobe,’ he told her. He said he liked the minimalism of the house, the sense of possibility the bare rooms offered, and enjoyed the way his three remaining LPs sounded in the empty rooms, but she saw him wince and hold his side as he got up to take the dishes to the kitchen. The next time she arrived, she brought a Lloyd Loom chair. ‘But that was your mum’s!’ he said. ‘You can’t give me that.’ She told him to call it an indefinite loan. On each of her next seven visits, she brought houseplants, so now it was a house of plants and a chair. He slept on a mattress and said he failed to see the point in bed frames, argued the case against them vehemently, even as he struggled visibly to pull himself upright. She worried about what he was doing to his back, carrying and splitting logs three days a week. She recommended a chiropractor – a haunted-looking man whose practice was based at the top of a haunted-looking building in the nearest big town – and, with some coaxing, he booked an appointment. In spring she filled the balcony with pot plants and Bob moaned that it ruined the view and diminished seating potential, but he nurtured each plant, inside and out, as if it were his own child, cooked every recipe she gave him, read every book she recommended, making notes as he went so he could give her feedback. He was the first man who’d ever listened to her.