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‘Do you mind?’
    ‘Of course not. Maybe I can help you pack.’
    It transpired that she didn’t live in the little cottage with the faintly hostile couple he had met but in a studio at the end of their tiny garden. It was really a converted garage, basic even by student standards. There was an outside privy and hot water from an Ascot over the tiny, much-chipped sink. Presumably when sponge washing was not enough, she borrowed the landlady’s bathroom. Otherwise there was a bed that doubled up as a sofa, a single rickety dining chair, a card table, a kettle and a toaster.
    She saw him taking it in. ‘It was the only place I could afford that had a bit of privacy,’ she explained. ‘Once the door’s shut, they couldn’t see in and I could let friends in at the window.’ She indicated the room’s window, which had been crudely inserted into what would have been the garage door, and he immediately pictured Professor Shepherd taking off his hat and wincing fastidiously as he climbed through it.
    She had pulled out a careworn cardboard suitcase from under the bed and was rapidly emptying the chest of drawers into it. He was struck by how few possessions she had. (He was shocked to watch her casually throw her few paperbacks into the wastepaper basket.) The meagre collection of plates, cutlery and dented pans were the landlords’. The only thing of beauty was an incongruous old pewter candlestick which she thrust among her clothes when he began to show an interest in it. Her painting things stood near the window: an old easel, which he dismantled andbundled up for her, and several shoeboxes stuffed with an assortment of paint tubes, bottles of turpentine, brushes and little palette knives. When he asked her where all her paintings were, she said she had got rid of them, with a kind of flash in her voice that warned him off the subject. She clearly did not mean she had sold them.
    She flung the window up and told him to bring his car round so they could load that way rather than trailing stuff through the house. Then she handed things out to him while he loaded. He had assumed she would need to leave through the house so as to settle up with her landlords and say goodbye so was surprised when she ended her labours by climbing through the window and closing it behind her.
    ‘But they’ll think we’re still in there together,’ he pointed out.
    ‘Oh probably,’ she said, shivering as she got back in the car. ‘I hate them. They don’t matter any more. Can you drive quite fast now, please?’
    He drove as fast as the car and the law allowed, which wasn’t very, but she seemed satisfied and palpably relaxed as they put more and more streets between themselves and the scene of her recent troubles. Then, as they left the city and began the drive towards Swindon, she asked a few questions about where they were going, about Penzance and his grandfather. Just how deaf was he? How big was the house? Were they near the sea? Was there somewhere she could paint? She wasn’t making conversation; she was asking questions so that he would talk so she didn’t have to. And he duly talked and found he wanted to.
    As if offering himself up, he told her everything. How his father had gone missing in the War and never returned and his mother effectively pined away with the stress of waiting for him.
    ‘Nobody pines away,’ she cut in scornfully. ‘Did she kill herself?’
    ‘I don’t know,’ he said, startled. ‘I was never told.’
    He related how his father’s parents raised him, how his grandfather had been the town’s best tailor. Her grasp of English geography seemed hazy – she thought Bristol was near Oxford and that Devon came before Somerset – so he tried to explain about Penzance and West Cornwall’s proud remoteness and how it was wisest not to think of it as part of England at all but as a kind of island nation linked to it by a railway.
    Thinking he had talked enough, he tried to encourage her. ‘Tell me