‘Yes. No. Sort of. It didn’t work, at all. He seemed like quite an asexual person. And there was the fact of Maddie too. It made it odder still. Maybe me getting close to him was a way to try to bring her back, a bit. After that, we sort of drifted. I know he stayed in Devon for a while, though. I would pass him in the car sometimes, walking along a lane, and wave from the car, but that was about it.’

‘And him and Maddie…’

‘There’s no way of telling. I was ten when she died. She wouldn’t have said anything to me and maybe I wouldn’t have remembered if she had. My assumption is that maybe they didn’t. He wouldn’t have told me something like that, but I do know that when they met he’d been under the impression that she had a boyfriend. I don’t remember her having boyfriends, not since school. She was very much a law unto herself, different from me and Mum and Dad. You can even see that in the way she died. We had two tractors, a new one and an old one, and Dad had told her not to take the old one with the iffy brakes to the far field, which was really steep, but she didn’t listen. She was more arty than the rest of us, she read Russian novels and listened to what my dad called “drug music”. Everyone loved her. Everyone. I couldn’t have been more different, really. I was one of the boys, not many female friends. I ended up working at the golf club, drank pints, watched football. People found me a bit stroppy, I think. But then I changed, became a lot more like her. Started going up to Exeter and Bristol, hitting all the charity shops, where you could get some total bargains back then, and buying clothes like the ones she used to wear. Gabardine skirts. Felt hats. I became much quieter. This sounds really crazy but I even used her name as my own sometimes, answered the phone as her. It was this deferred way of processing grief, I think. And then after that, I kind of became me, whatever that is. That would have been not long after Richie died, I suppose. And that was when I repainted the painting.’

‘I really can’t wait to hear these songs.’

She doesn’t seem to hear me say it, just hears the other question in my mind, the one that I was too afraid to ask.