‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘That’s how it must be.’

‘But it isn’t a reliable refuge,’ he said in a low voice. ‘The world blows it apart again and again, and it becomes harder to find excuses to believe the thing that’s least painful.’

‘Mr Dane-what are you telling me?’

‘I’d have done anything to save my son from the knowledge that his mother rejected him. I stalled on the divorce, went out to Switzerland to see her, begged her to return to us. I hated her by then but I’d have taken her back for his sake.

‘I even bought this house for her. It’s bigger, better than the one we had. She liked nice things. I thought-’

‘You thought you could get her back by spending money?’ Evie said, speaking cautiously.

‘She wouldn’t even come home for a while, even to look at it. She was besotted by her lover. She cared about nothing else.’

‘What happened?’

‘She died. They died together when his car crashed. I was over there at the time, and since she was still legally my wife it fell to me to oversee her funeral. I suppose it should have occurred to me to bring her home, but it didn’t. She’s buried in Switzerland.’

‘But-Mark-you were willing to do so much to get her back for him-’

‘When she was alive, yes. But when she was dead, what difference could it make?’

She stared at him, nonplussed by a man who could be so sensitively generous on the one hand, and so dully oblivious on the other.

‘I think it would have made a difference to Mark to have her nearby, even if she was dead,’ she tried to explain. ‘People need a focus for their grief, somewhere where they can feel closer to the person they’ve lost. That’s what graves are really for.

‘And Mark feels it more because you sold the house where she used to be and made him live in a place where she never was. So he can’t go around and remember that this was where they shared a joke, and that was where she used to make his tea.