And so it would go on. It seemed to me that I had spent days and days dealing with my affairs, sorting out Greg’s stuff, generally getting things ordered, but as I saw my bedroom, the junk room and the spare bedroom through Fergus’s eyes, I had to admit that it didn’t look like it. If there are stages of mourning, there are also stages of tidying. The first stage is your basic untidiness. The second stage is deciding to do something about it. The third stage involves getting everything out of the drawers, cupboards and shelves so you can see what you have to deal with it. The third stage necessarily looks much worse than the first. I wasn’t sure about the fourth because I hadn’t yet got to it.

There were piles of Greg’s clothes in the bedroom. The spare room functioned as a sort of office. It had a nice view over the garden toward the plane tree that stood next door. We had never made it a proper office because we’d been going to make the junk room into an office and turn the spare room into a nursery, put up silly wallpaper with clowns on it or something like that. The spare bedroom and the landing were piled high with files, papers, folders and books, some of which were connected with Greg’s work. “It looks bad, I know,” I said. “I’m in the process of getting it sorted.”

There was so much I couldn’t say, starting with the supposed excuse that one of the reasons I hadn’t cleared up the house was that I had been down in Camberwell, sorting out Milena Livingstone’s office.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ve already heard about this from one of my spies.”

“Who was it? I bet it was Mary. If I live to be a hundred and spend the entire time doing housework, I’ll never live up to her standards of cleanliness.”

“I’m not saying,” said Fergus. “I’m not able to reveal my sources. What I can do is tell you the plan.”

“The plan?”

“Are you at home today?”

“I hadn’t thought of going anywhere.”

“Good. You might have some visitors.”

“Who are they? What are they going to do?”

“I think you’ll recognize them. What they’ll do, basically, is help you deal with this. Some of it they’ll do on site, as it were, but mainly we don’t want to be in your hair. We can take things away, sort them out. If you trust us, that is.”

I stepped forward and put my arms around him and my face into his shoulder, the way babies do when they’re held. I couldn’t see his expression. It might have been horror, for all I knew, but I felt his arms go around me. I stepped back.