After the divorce they sold the house in the country. My mother moved the furniture into a small house on the edge of town. It was pretty enough, the new house, in an English sort of a way, with clematis at the front and strawberry pots round the back, but I never understood how she could live there, with the rumble of the by-pass at the bottom of the hill and those dark cupboards tripping her up. But then I have always found my mother’s house claustrophobic and time with her difficult. Once, long ago, it was easy, or perhaps that’s only a memory, like summers when it never rained.

When I stayed with her for a month during the last summer of her life, it had been a long time since I had lived with that furniture and neither of us were quite sure how it would be. But the days passed quietly enough, there was shopping and washing to be done and we used the time well. It was hot that year. The sky was hazy and colourless. The noises of summer came in on the breeze and while I sat in her room and shelled the peas she talked to me about her life and went through old photos from times that she had come to accept but that still rankled with me.