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The carpet in the passage was damp with footprints, more of which he would have avoided if he hadn’t been distracted by sounds in the rooms. Where he’d seen the teddy bear someone was murmuring “Up you come to Mummy. Gummy gum.” Next door a voice was crooning “There you all are,” presumably to the photographs, and Shone was glad to hear no words from the site of the lopsided knitting, only a clicking so rapid it sounded mechanical. Rather than attempt to interpret any of the muffled noises from the rooms off the darker section of the corridor, he padded downstairs so fast he almost missed his footing twice.

Nothing was moving in the hall except rain under the front door. Several conversations were ignoring one another in the television lounge. He picked up the receiver and thrust coins into the box, and his finger faltered over the zero on the dial. Perhaps because he was distracted by the sudden hush, he couldn’t remember Ruth’s number.

He dragged the hole of the zero around the dial as far as it would go in case that brought him the rest of the number, and as the hole whirred back to its starting point, it did. Ten more turns of the dial won him a ringing padded with static, and he felt as if the entire house was waiting for Ruth to answer. It took six pairs of rings—longer than she needed to cross her flat—to make her say “Ruth Lawson.”

“It’s me, Ruth.” When there was silence he tried reviving their joke. “Old Ruthless.”

“What now, Tom?”

He’d let himself hope for at least a dutiful laugh, but its absence threw him less than the reaction from within the television lounge: a titter, then several. “I just wanted you to know—”

“You’re mumbling again. I can’t hear you.”

He was only seeking to be inaudible to anyone but her. “I say, I wanted you to know I really did get the day wrong,” he said louder. “I really thought I was supposed to be coming up today.”

“Since when has your memory been that bad?”

“Since, I don’t know, today, it seems like. No, fair enough, you’ll be thinking of your birthday. I know I forgot that too.”

A wave of mirth escaped past the ajar door across the hall. Surely however many residents were in there must be laughing at the television with the sound turned down, he told himself as Ruth retorted “If you can forget that you’ll forget anything.”

“I’m sorry.

“I’m sorrier.”

“I’m sorriest,” he risked saying, and immediately wished he hadn’t completed their routine, not only since it no longer earned him the least response from her but because of the roars of laughter from the television lounge. “Look, I just wanted to be sure you knew I wasn’t trying to catch you out, that’s all.”

“Tom.”

All at once her voice was sympathetic, the way it might have sounded at an aged relative’s bedside. “Ruth,” he said, and almost as stupidly, “What?”

“You might as well have been.”

“I might … you mean I might …”

“I mean you nearly did.”

“Oh.” After a pause as hollow as he felt he repeated the syllable, this time not with disappointment but with all the surprise he could summon up. He might have uttered yet another version of the sound, despite or even because of the latest outburst of amusement across the hall, if Ruth hadn’t spoken. “I’m talking to him now.”

“Talking to who?”

Before the words had finished leaving him Shone understood that she hadn’t been speaking to him but about him, because he could hear a man’s voice in her flat. Its tone was a good deal more than friendly to her, and it was significantly younger than his. “Good luck to you both,” he said, less ironically and more maturely than he would have preferred, and snagged the hook with the receiver.

A single coin trickled down the chute and hit the carpet with a plop. Amidst hilarity in the television lounge several women were crying “To who, to who” like a flock of owls. “He’s good, isn’t he,” someone else remarked, and Shone was trying to decide where to take his confusion bordering on panic when a bell began to toll as it advanced out of the dark part of the house.

It was a small but resonant