She shook her head again. ‘No. It’s ridiculous. I don’t want an extra miserable six months of chemotherapy. I want lots and lots of good drugs. You might have to help me with that. You’re a young person. You’ll know about drugs and that.’

‘Violet, I’m a quantity surveyor.’

‘Hmm.’

‘What kind of cancer?’

‘Oh, it’s everywhere,’ she said. ‘I’m basically so old I’m just one big blob now anyway. I’ve fused. With black threads running through me.’

Mirren suddenly got a lump in her throat. Violet just seemed so stoic, all alone in this room lined with her books. She had never married or had children – it was apparently frightfully bourgeois and boring after Cambridge – and had instead lectured in English at the University of Sussex.

‘You are being very brave,’ Mirren said.

‘Good,’ said Violet. ‘Tell everyone. I am being terribly matter-of-fact and practical. Extremely admirable and brave.’

‘Do you feel terribly admirable and brave?’

Violet looked at Mirren then, through the big glasses, and gave her head one sharp shake. Then Mirren sat and held her, and they both had a good cry.

‘Don’t you DARE tell Nora,’ said Violet, hiccupping as Mirren passed her a hanky. ‘She’ll start sending me inspirational messages on the internet and doing sponsored swims.’

‘I shan’t,’ lied Mirren. Nora would get it out of her in two seconds flat. ‘Okay. What is going to help? Sweets? Whisky?’

‘I don’t ... I don’t feel like eating at all.’

Mirren almost said,Oh, you have to eat, before remembering how many other well-meaning people would be giving her exactly this advice, so she shut her mouth.

Violet got a sly look on her face.

‘You’re young, Mirren.Doyou know where to get any drugs?’

‘Violet! And no, I really don’t know where to get any drugs!’

‘Can you pretend that you do? Just in case they won’t give me any in case I get addicted to it in the three months I have left to develop a habit and start living under a bridge?’

‘I ... I’ll have a think,’ said Mirren, remembering her Persian friend whose father had always smoked opium in Iran and had seen no reason to give up the habit on arriving in Europe.

‘I want my daddy,’ said Violet suddenly, then she covered her mouth with her hand. ‘Oh God, don’t tell anyone I said that. I don’t even know where it came from.’

‘I won’t,’ Mirren said.

Violet had lost her father, Mirren’s great-grandfather Reg, in the war. She could barely remember him. She covered her face with her hands.

‘There is one thing,’ she said eventually. ‘One thing I would really like.’

‘Not heroin?’

Violet shook her head just a little. Her long pale hand was trembling. The veins stuck out. Her watery eyes suddenly stared over Mirren’s head, looking at something that wasn’t there.

‘I had ... we had something. When I was a little girl. A book.’

‘What kind of a book?’

‘A Child’s Garden of Verses,’ said Violet, quite without hesitation. ‘By Robert Lighthouse Stevenson. No, wait. Robert Louis Stevenson.’

Mirren frowned.

‘That sounds familiar,’ she said.