‘I can see how that could happen. He wasn’t all bad. People aren’t. With exceptions. He was tough and if he liked you he liked you. Years later, he came to find me. I didn’t want to know. It took a long time for me to come round. I was working in Bishop’s Waltham. A lot of people would have given up but he didn’t. He didn’t have any other children. Or none he knew about, anyhow. He rubbed a lot of people up the wrong way and it was only if they stood the rubbing up that they stuck around and found out who he was. I was all he had, at the end. Me, and the cabin. He loved it out there on the beach because it was away from the world and his wife. Not his own wife – I believe he was quite nice to her, in the end, and enjoyed being with her. The world’s. It was something he always said. The world and his wife. From what I read in the newspapers they are currently in the process of getting divorced. Have you seen these donkeys here on the left? I just adore their noses. So anyway now it appears I have a cabin. Would you like a cabin? I am joking. I will probably keep it. I go up, clear some of it, then wonder what I’m doing, then come back, then wonder some more. Sugar! I’ve missed my turning because I’m talking so much. I am sorry about your head. Is it very bad?’

The road climbed into dense woodland and she parked on a sandy bulge just off the tarmac beside a sign with a picture of a bench on it. Through a gap in the trees, it was possible to glimpse the conurbation lit up in a hazy bowl at the bottom of the valley. ‘I would take you further,’ she said. ‘But I don’t drive in cities, as a rule.’ He said it was cool, he could walk, and thanked her. ‘Oh!’ she said, looking at his boots. ‘What size are you?’ He told her he was an eleven and she opened the back door and handed him a pair of brown loafers. ‘These were his,’ she said. ‘Nine and a half. It’s not ideal, I know, but it’s an improvement.’