Cora sat in her armchair by the window with a nice fresh cup of tea and a slice of toast and marmalade, cut in two neat halves.

Holly was a good girl. She’d seemed so grateful for the modest meal Cora had served up last night. A salmon fillet and vegetable medley – nothing special, and yet her young visitor’s eyes had lit up as she declared she hadn’t eaten anything as posh as salmon for an age.

What a treat it had been for Cora to sit with another person again and chat about this and that without the pressure of saying the right thing or tripping herself up in some way, as had been the case with Harold before his illness moved him permanently upstairs.

As the cancer took a firmer grip, his temper had worsened. Far from showing appreciation for his wife’s constant care and attention, he had grown increasingly critical.

‘This steak is overdone,’ he would bark. Or, ‘Same old boring sandwiches again. Can’t you come up with something new?’

But one day, it was as though someone else entirely took over Cora’s body, and she could only sit back and watch.

Harold had picked up a sandwich and peeled back the top slice of the dainty triangle to look beneath. When he saw the thick-sliced ham and tomato underneath with a thin spread of mayonnaise just as he liked it, he huffed disparagingly and dropped it back on the plate like a piece of dirt.

Cora had stood up quite calmly and whipped the plate from under his nose. She’d picked up his mug of tea from the bedside table and simply walked from the room with a serene look on her face, turning back only to pull the door closed behind her with a hooked foot.

Harold had bellowed insults for what seemed like hours.

Cora had taken her own sandwich and tea into the lounge, closed the door and put Antiques Roadshow on with the volume turned up at least twice as loud as Harold ordinarily allowed it.

The faint rumble of his bellowing eventually grew dim and then stopped. When Cora crept up over an hour later, he had fallen fast asleep, still sitting up in bed.

She left him as he was and slept on the sofa.

The next morning when she took up his breakfast, the incident wasn’t mentioned by either of them, but Cora noticed he never complained about his meals again. Her only regret was that she hadn’t done it years ago.

Over tea, Holly had been excited about a job she had applied for at one of the agencies in town. It was working in retail at some posh department store, apparently.

Cora knew of a few such shops in the city but had never set foot in any of them. Harold had always baulked at the price of goods in the more stylish window displays and moved her hastily on.

Vaguely it occurred to her that she might know someone who worked in such a shop, but the information, though it danced tantalisingly close to her consciousness, did not come quite close enough for her to grab it.

She hadn’t told anyone, not even Dr Geeson, but in recent months she’d noticed this sort of thing happening more and more. It was the same sensation as trying to grasp the contents of a dream upon waking. The harder she tried, the more it evaded her.

On occasion, she could recall a vague sense of something she had once known or been told, but the detail was a devil to recover and Cora had reached the conclusion that it was far easier to give up than to feel continually frustrated that she could only grasp a thread of it.

Of course, there was no denying she was getting older, but she was far from over the hill. A bit of forgetfulness she could handle, but the trouble was, the newspapers and magazines seemed to be full of articles on dementia: how you could tell if you had it, what you could do to avoid it… Far from being helpful, Cora found it all rather a worry.

Holly’s voice broke into her troubled musings.

‘The agency just emailed my details over to the store. I’ve an interview at ten thirty in the morning!’ she told Cora excitedly. ‘It’s just a retail assistant position, not great money, but I’ve checked and I can easily get there on the bus. I never thought I’d be given an opportunity within days of arriving here.’

‘And this is a full-time position?’ Cora said, her voice brittle.

She wasn’t really interested in Holly’s job and felt quite peeved that her new companion had already found something else to do with time that could have been spent listening to Cora’s interesting stories.

Holly had seemed so fascinated by them when she’d first arrived, but now, this wretched interview was suddenly all she wanted to discuss.

‘Yes, full-time Monday to Saturday, with a day off in the week.’ She thought for a moment, a runner bean speared mid-air on her fork. ‘Oh yes, and once I’m up to speed, I could request two Saturdays a month off if I want them.’

‘As I’ve said before, you needn’t rush into anything on my account.’ Cora sniffed. ‘You don’t want to take some dead-end, low-paid job just for the sake of it, do you now?’

Holly’s face dropped, but Cora couldn’t help herself.

‘You know, I could probably lend you a bit of money to tide you over, if you needed it.’

‘Thank you, Cora,’ Holly said, laying down her cutlery. ‘That’s really kind of you, but I wouldn’t dream of putting on you like that. If I get the job, I’ll even be able to pay you some rent.’

‘Nonsense, I wouldn’t have offered unless I meant it. And I think of you as my guest or a visitor, not a tenant.’

Holly paused, keen to make herself properly understood.

‘It’s not just the money, Cora. It’s about starting a new life here in Nottingham. Perhaps I could make a few friends at work and go to the cinema or the bowling alley… just normal stuff that people of my age do, you know?’

Cora stood up and picked up her plate.

‘Oh, are you finished already?’ Holly exclaimed, watching her face. ‘You’ve only eaten half your meal, I hope I didn’t—’

‘I’m just not hungry any more,’ Cora said curtly. ‘I think I’m going to have a little lie-down.’