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I’d always had my books, and Cynth had always been there. Suddenly, my thoughts were enormous in that tiny flat, because there was nobody to hear them and make them manageable, nobody cajoling or supporting me, or holding out their arms for a hug. Cynth’s absence became physical to me. Do you have a body if no one is there to touch it? I suppose you do, but sometimes it felt like I didn’t. I was just a mind, floating around the rooms. How badly prepared I’d been for the echo and clunk of my key in the lock, the lack of her sizzling frying pan, my solitary toothbrush, the silence where once she hummed her favourite songs.
    When you saw a person every day – a person you liked, a person who lifted you up – you thought you were your best self, without trying very hard. Now, I saw myself as barely interesting, not so clever. No one wanted to hear my poems except Cynth, no one cared or understood where I was from like she did. I didn’t know how to be Odelle without Cynth to make me so. Cynth had done so much for me, but because she was gone, I still managed to resent her.
    Her work commitments and mine meant we were only meeting once a fortnight, in the Lyon’s on Craven Street round the corner from the Skelton. I barely credited Cynth for the fact it was she who always arranged it.
    AT THE COUNTER, THE WAITRESS had slopped our cups so the liquid had spilled onto the saucer, and the bun I’d asked for was the most squashed. When I asked for a replacement saucer, the waitress ignored me, and when I paid for it, she wouldn’t put the change in my hand. She placed the money on the counter and pushed it over, not looking at my face. I turned to Cynth, and her expression looked familiar; closed. We walked to find a spare table, as far away from the counter as we could.
    â€˜How is it at the work?’ she asked. ‘You still trailin’ after that Marjorie Quick?
    â€˜She my boss, Cynthia.’
    â€˜So you say.’
    I hadn’t realized how obvious it was, the impression that Quick had made on me over the recent weeks. I had tried to find out more about Quick from Pamela, who could only tell me that Quick had once mentioned the county of Kent as her childhood home. What she did between being a girl and a woman in her fifties was a grey sketch. Perhaps she had been destined for a genteel, Kentish life, a magistrate’s wife or some such, but she chose instead to find a different kind of fortune in the rubble of post-­war London. Her name was not in Debrett’s : she was not a Skelton descendant, one of my initial lines of thought. Her impeccable sartorial choices exuded power, a care of herself that was for nobody’s benefit but her own. Each perfect blouse or scarf, each pristine pair of trousers was a pre-­emptive self-­narration. Quick’s clothes were an armour made of silk.
    I knew she was unmarried and she lived in Wimbledon, just off the common. She smoked constantly, and appeared close to Reede in the sort of way that water is close to a stone that it has worn down over decades. Pamela said that Quick had been here as long as Reede had, when he’d taken the directorship of the Skelton in 1947, twenty years ago. How she had come to meet Reede, or why she decided to take employment, remained a mystery. I wondered what sort of battle it had been to get to where she was now, and whether she’d read those Roman histories to give her some lessons in war.
    â€˜She not like anyone I ever met,’ I said to Cynth. ‘Friendly one minute, a sunlight beam. Then she like a hog-­brush woman – she bristle so, it pain you to be near.’
    Cynth sighed. ‘We bought G Plan for the flat.’
    â€˜G-­what?’
    â€˜Oh, Delly. Sam work hard hard, so me say, let we buy we a nice G Plan sofa so he can put up him feet at the end of the day.’
    â€˜Hmm. And how your feet doin’?’
    She sighed, stirring her lukewarm