Footsteps approached in the corridor, stopped and withdrew again.

There was a pile of letters and some were from him and some of these were unopened. He opened them and laid them, unread, next to the others and near the pictures he had drawn of her when thinking about her or speaking with her on the phone.

There was also a box of photographs. He rummaged through them and took pictures out of the box and returned them without looking at them. Then he took them out again and examined them more closely. The photos dated from their time together, yet he didn’t appear in any of them.

The phone rang. He had his hand on the receiver when the answering machine came on and he could hear the sound of hesitant breathing.

The more recent pictures were of people he didn’t know. They weren’t always the same people, but some reappeared frequently, showing their varying degrees of intimacy with her. Most were of celebrations – birthdays, Christmas, Easter – or were taken on holiday on different coasts, always in places that had once been theirs. They showed her leaning against a tree or with her head framed by the branches, at a concert or in an art gallery she had discovered. From the variety of places and people in the pictures, you could tell how much time had elapsed, and he noticed how much her face had changed. In many of the pictures he only recognized her after scrutinizing them carefully. But he avoided looking into her eyes. He remembered how he had once wanted to take a picture of her and how long he had waited for a moment when she didn’t look tense and how difficult he had made things for himself because the child in her arms refused to wait any longer and wanted to be photographed immediately. He put the photos back in the box and looked at all the pictures up on the wall, expecting to find himself in them. But only the same faces he had just encountered in the photos from the box looked back at him from the frames.