Fleur had been correct. Bob lived in the house pretty much the way he wanted to, which was to say that after a while he lived with three chairs, fourteen houseplants and a table. There was never a time in any of the rooms when he couldn’t hear the river, unless he had one of his three remaining LPs playing loud, and on spring nights when Sally stayed over and she and Bob sat up in bed, it often felt like having a conversation in a quiet annexe of a party, next door to a room where a bigger, noisier conversation was going on. Sally, especially, was attuned to every change in the current and flow, every small rise in the water level. In bed at night with the lights off, as they half-listened to the river’s hot takes and counterpoints, she often had a lot to say and he’d keep pushing sleep away in order to hear it. When she finally dropped off, it was like a switch had been flicked – she described it that way herself, but said ‘like a flick had been switched’ because she had not fully woken up – and then, having pushed sleep away for so long and missed his chance for it, he’d be alone, stranded with his thoughts. He noticed she often slept with her arms folded, as if waiting for a dream to impress her. After a year, he knew everything about her except the trimmings. He knew that she had lupus but didn’t like to tell people about it and enjoyed bananas when they had gone a bit bad and never stood on manholes and that her parents had both been music teachers and played in the West Newcastle Symphony Orchestra and that they had twanged door handles when she was little and asked her to identify the musical note they made. He knew about all her previous romantic partners, about Jake the narcissist web designer who now lived in Seattle, about Ben who cooked extraordinarily well but slept with her best friend when she was twenty-one and about Michael who had amazing hands and taught her to use his own unique non-standard tuning on the guitar but didn’t like putting his cock inside anything or anyone. He knew where each of the four notable scars on her body came from and why and precisely which month in which year in which century they occurred. He knew that she did not believe in ghosts but was also adamant that one otherwise silent December day, when she could see the fog settling over the tor through the cottage window, she had heard her piano play two notes all on its own. He knew it all but it did not stop him loving every octave and quaver of her voice and eagerly awaiting what she had to say every time she opened her mouth.