Friday: he talked about his late wife Joyce for about half an hour, which I took as a man opening up to me, and which was, I think, him deciding whether he could trust himself.
Saturday: the records, and the kettle, and the frame.
He did not engineer a single conversation. I have been through it four times looking for the place where he steered me and it is not there.
What he did was wait, for four days, at seventy-one, with a folder in his spare room — and let a woman who had flown eleven thousand miles to be nobody's project carry on being nobody's project for another ninety-six hours.
What he already knew.
He knew who I was before he spoke to me.
On the second afternoon I had said that I came from Marley Bridge, because he asked.
He had been looking for that family since 1998.
He has a folder. He showed me, eventually, after the fourth cup of tea and about an hour of my crying, which he was extremely good about.
