Alone, he admits to being a poor little guy—isn’t everyone with any degree of self-knowledge an insignificant person?—but denies taking himself for a genius. What does it mean, anyway, to take oneself? Surely in such a case of false self-identification one should say mistake oneself. Ah, those lying words.

“I want to still be me,” says Tig. “You still are you,” Nell says. “So far,” says Tig. Another pause. “We’ll get through it,” says Nell. “Yes, we will,” says Tig. They squeeze hands.

What is she doing, wandering around the house in the middle of the night, in the middle of this one condensed slice of past time in which so much is happening but so much is obscure? Pawing through the rubble, a brick here, a shard there, fragments of lives; trying to understand things that can’t be understood, or not by her. Pieces of paper,

Single strand of pearls, wild, not cultured. (Worth it, she said. Only the wild ones had souls.)

What were the adjectives you might use for her? Practical, sentimental, tough, empathetic, determined. Fearless, though no one is fearless really; more like a calculated risk-taker.

The really successful products for ads then were cigarettes and booze; also anything to do with soap, because the war had been so grimy and filthy everyone wanted to scrub themselves blue afterwards.

What you mean is how am I managing to cope, now that Tig has died. Am I lonely? Am I suffering? Is the house too empty? Am I checking all the boxes of the prescribed grieving process? Have I gone into the dark tunnel, dressed in mourning black with gloves and a veil, and come out the other end, all cheery and wearing bright colours and loaded for

The tidying up. There’s a lot of that. So much accumulates, year after year. Then there’s a mini-explosion, and all the items that have been gathered together—the letters, the books, the passports, the photos, the favourite things kept in drawers and boxes or on shelves—all of this is strewn in the wake of the departing rocket or comet or wave of

He and an alcoholic pal checked into a drying-out clinic, but before their first day they climbed over the back wall and buried half a dozen bottles of Scotch on the grounds, in case of dire need. He told this as if it had been a caper, a prank, and we’d laughed dutifully; but as I’m revisiting this escapade now, I frame it otherwise. Clambering