He wanted to play the piano. It shouldn’t just sit there, gathering hair. The desire had come over him out of nowhere. Would it be too late to learn? Why had he never asked her to teach him? Was that neglectful of him? Could he have taken more of an interest? At least found out how it all worked? He opened the lid and wiped the hair off a couple of the keys and pulled some more out of the gap between them and hit the keys experimentally. He noticed starlings, more of a plume than a murmuration, out the window and as he did he felt this had all happened before: the opening of the piano, the slight cough caught in his throat, the birds, the bottle of Baby Bio on the window ledge. It was a kind of déjà vu he experienced now, but different to what déjà vu used to be. It always felt like he was experiencing the reality of a dream he’d dreamed and that he also knew what happened next but couldn’t touch it. It was as vivid as when he got sucked into the past but it was different: it sucked him into the present, as imagined from the past. The moment always felt weighted equally with significance and banality until he lost it, like a small precious object dropped in a toilet bowl just as you’d pulled the chain.

The last person who’d played the piano had not been Sally but Fleur, not long before she died. In her seventies, she’d taken a younger lover – a town councillor of just forty-eight – and it had been the talk of the combe. Bob, now at a similar age, would do nothing of the sort. Firstly, how would that even happen? And secondly, it had not occurred to him as an ambition. He had met Fleur’s younger man just once, a reedy human with a nervous chuckle who, even though he was of a roughly equal width and height to Fleur, gave the slight impression of living inside her coat. The encounter had been on the lane, around this time of year, and Fleur had talked about how late the bats were staying around now, and how much it worried her. Now they stayed around even later. December, sometimes. ‘GO HOME, bats,’ Fleur had said, to the bats.