Taking the washing off the line beneath the wide cherry tree, he saw petals of pink blossom in the folds. He smiled and prepared to shake them out. But on second thoughts, he took the washing inside and shook it across the dun carpet. And lay down on the sofa at peace.

He looked in the mirror. Closely, nose almost touching. Who was that? Not in an existential, who's this person I've become sort of way, but more mundane. He didn't recognise himself just as he wouldn't recognise a stranger he bumped into in the street. A fact of unrecognition.

Leaving the loneliness of a week with his rapidly ageing mother, he drove two hundred motorway miles to arrive home to a flat undisturbed by his solitary return. But walking into the garden he saw the cherry tree's blossom waiting. And before he had thought, he had said 'I love you'.

Why could April feel colder than December? He loved April, but because of its cruelty not its love. I am here, it said, I am a portal to the summer, but you won't find summer in me. I will still remind you of winter.

He had not looked after himself. Not his body. He'd done his best with that. It looked a mess but then all bodies his age looked a mess. No, it was his mind. He had let it wander as a child and never called it back. Now it had gone a long way away, a sun setting over the horizon.

Lying in bed on a sun soaked morning, he poked his toes out from under the duvet. How far away they were. How much duvet there was between him and those toes. Where they really his? Did he really fill all that intervening space? No, he didn't recognise any of this at all.

He measured his anxiety with his electric toothbrush. Why didn't more people try it?

If he finished before the two-minute warning he knew he wasn't in good shape. But if he got to the sixth sound, the three-minute call, he almost broke down. Because, for now, the fear had gone.

As he put his hands deep into the warm water of the washing-up bowl - though the washing-up, now his task alone, had been done - he wondered why he should ever take them out. And why everything in his life seemed such a long time ago.

It still surprised him even though it was no longer true. Surprised him that some velvet morning or maybe even more mornings than one, she had wanted to be with him more than anything, anyone else, in the whole wide world. Some velvet morning never forgotten.

Sitting in the meeting he was suddenly overpowered by how smart and eloquent people seemed. Their words all seemed to make sense, they knew what they were talking about. He felt afraid to speak. And worse, they seemed physically bigger than him, better made. And it felt permanent.

He knew he didn't have much. He knew he was well down people's lists. He knew he couldn't rely on himself. He knew time was waiting for him. But, at night, he had Barbara Pym's books and Thomas Hardy's poetry. And a brief companionship would begin.

'Look, look isn't it marvellous?' the man hollered from the other side of the sun-smashed street. Passers-by looked around.

'Look, look,' he shouted again. Some smiled; most bowed heads.

'Look, look,' he said a third time. 'The morning. Isn't it marvellous?'

The February birds sang long after dark had come. Couldn't wait for spring when nights would be long.

In the garden he was invited to a chorus of innocence and hope. And nothing in-between.

He closed the door and went back in; to where nights were long and it would never be spring.

A company email reminded everyone about 'inappropriate relationships'. It seemed to imply all of them. She wondered about the Financial Accountant and the HR Manager who, after all, were married.

And her relationships? Hadn't they all been inappropriate in their different ways?

It had taken her until well in to her fifth decade to realise that life wasn't like she had thought it. It didn't look how she had thought it looked. People weren't as she'd thought them. She felt she should change. But change wasn't how she had thought it either

He had started doing press-ups each morning. His aim was to get to his age in years, increasing a decade a month until mid-summer. He had struggled with infancy but soon got going through adolescence. But at 27 he became stuck. He couldn't get past. As if he never had.

Monday evening. There was nothing he wanted to do. But he hated doing nothing. So he thought about what he might do until it was too late to do it at all.

He lay on the bed. He should read because he really did love books.

Outside a roar. Time passing.

He'd asked her to meet him in the cathedral, to the side, where the Virgin loomed. She wouldn't come. There'd never been any chance. But at least the hours before meeting brought a sort of relief. Not anticipation, or even hope, but a brief replacement for the endless emptiness.

February 1947

Lucy looked at Augustus reading in his late evening chair. He hadn't spoken for four hours. It was often longer. It wasn't her. In any given situation he rarely spoke unless he had to. As if in most cases, staying quiet made more sense.

Young again, lying in bed, and there's sun, and a book, and a wagging dog. And something else. What is it? What is the missing ingredient?

Ah yes. It is the absence of fear.

Each winter, if the cold was cold enough, he would stand at the open patio door and breath funnels of steam into the night, and imagine he were exhaling all that he had absorbed during the day, the accumulations that he needed to shed before he could prepare his mind for sleep.

When young and incarcerated at boarding school, he had wanted only to escape to small things, like fruit cake and autumn nights. Older, he had wanted big things, though he'd never known what they might be. Now old, he had only small things, though he couldn't be bothered to bake.

He'd always been aware that he'd never said anything that was fundamentally true. Not as in lying but saying something with the conviction that others had, as if for them it was as fixed as the moon on a clear night. For him, words that left lips could always have been different.

From under the wind fresh duvet she woke up to Saturday sun. And all was well with her world.

She turned out the light on the dark Saturday night. And her world lay wrecked around her.

And nothing had happened in-between except her mind.

Every January, almost unwittingly, he reset, stepped back and looked at himself and his thoughts from afar. And the view shocked him. How could he be like that, think like that? Why couldn't he not be like that? Surely he could? Surely?

But soon it was February.

Since she had left he had moved to the middle of the bed; and as he lay, diagonally, the bed seemed so small. How had two of them ever shared it? Indeed, how had two of them ever shared a life? Because now his life seemed so small. Had it once been different? Larger?

His first girlfriend used to ask him why he liked her which he did but which he could never answer. He used to think about it on the walk home and feel that if he couldn't answer she would think he didn't.

But in time, he had come to realise it was the unanswerable question.

He had started his stories with ambitions to find clues to things, things like what and why and who, not him things, but wider things, all of us things. But now he was reduced to small things, him things. It felt like he had always been heading there. That it's where we all end.

He'd always felt that there existed, outside himself, a collective and even individual wisdom, however fragile, that he didn't possess and couldn't participate in. That was his loneliness.

No. His loneliness was that even if others felt the same, they could never describe it.

On the fourth day of Christmas, my true love said to me:

"I never want to see you again."

And still another nine days to Epiphany.