Staring into the fire, Nathan turned his glass round in his fingers and said slowly, “I don’t know. I was numb at that point, and it seemed as though I just went through the motions. I’m still not sure I’ve really taken it in.” He looked up at Adam and smiled. “But I was going to tell you about the cottage. That’s what made up my mind for me, about what I should do. I didn’t think I could bear staying in the Cambridge house without Jean, and I’d been toying with the idea of taking rooms in College, but I couldn’t quite make up my mind to do that either. Then when Mother and Dad passed away within weeks of each other and left me this…” Nathan stood and went to the window, shutting the curtains against the rain now driving against the glass.

“It was paid for, of course, but in quite horrendous condition,” he continued. “I felt utterly at sea. It took a friend to pound the reality of the situation through my thick skull. Jean and I had lived in the Cambridge house for almost twenty-five years; the mortgage was near to being paid off, and the property values had shot up.”

“So you sold the house and used the proceeds here.” Adam gestured more largely then he intended, the whisky having rather gone to his head. He’d fasted before Communion this morning, then discovered the bit of vegetable flan he’d been saving for his lunch had gone moldy.

Nathan retrieved his drink and stood cradling it, his back to the fire. “It’s actually been quite liberating, funnily enough. Jean and I put off so many things over the years, thinking we’d wait until we could afford them, but somehow it never came to pass.” Grinning, he added, “Having two daughters probably had something to do with it. Those two delicate little things could go through pound notes like starving dogs in a sausage factory.”

Adam remembered Nathan’s daughters not as the young women, dark clothed and red faced with weeping, whom he’d seen briefly at Jean’s funeral, but as two little girls in white frilly dresses and pink hair ribbons. “Are they both married, then?”