Two People Have Told Her It Sounds Cold. It Was the Opposite.

It was the opposite of cold, and Fran has got better at explaining why.

It was the first conversation she had had in twenty years in which somebody told her what they were going to want in advance, rather than waiting until it was urgent and then presenting it as an emergency.

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Gordon, for the record, had never once done that.

Gordon wanted things silently, for years, and then announced them as decisions.

The conservatory. The move to the village in 2009, which Fran did not want and which was presented to her as a fait accompli over a Sunday lunch with his parents present, so that objecting would have been a scene. His mother coming to stay for what turned out to be fourteen months. The dog. Selling the dog’s — she will not go into the dog.

And then, at the end, the biggest one, which was announced in exactly the same voice as the conservatory.

“He never lied to me,” Fran says. “I want to be fair. He never once lied. He just never told me anything until it was finished, and then he was surprised I was upset, because by then it was a fact and you can’t be upset about a fact.”

That is why there is a list. That is what item nine is.

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They have been together four years now.

He has his flat. She has her house. Eleven minutes apart. They spend perhaps four nights a week in the same building and three apart, and both of them prefer it, and both of them have said so independently to other people, which Fran regards as the only real evidence.

They go away twice a year. They do Christmas at hers with her children and Boxing Day at his son’s. He has a drawer. She has a shelf in his bathroom and a coat on the back of his door.

Neither of them has a key. That is not a rule. It has simply not come up, and both of them have noticed that it has not come up, and neither has mentioned noticing.

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Item four has come up twice.

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The first time was after his hip, in the second year.

He could not manage the stairs at the flat for six weeks, and Fran’s downstairs loo and the bed that could go in the dining room made it obvious, and she moved him in without either of them making a decision about it.

It was fine. It was better than fine for about four weeks. She liked coming down in the morning and finding somebody there. He was easy to have in a house, which she had not been sure about, and he did the crossword out loud, and she got used to that faster than she expected.

In the fifth week she found herself, at about six in the evening, standing in the kitchen working out what he would want for dinner before she had worked out what she wanted, and she stopped with the fridge door open and thought: there it is.

Nobody had asked her to do that. That was the entire point. Nobody had asked her to do it in nineteen years either.

At the end of the six weeks they both said, carefully, at different moments on the same day, that it had been lovely and that they were both quite glad it was over.

“And we meant both halves,” Fran says. “That’s what I’d want people to take from it. We weren’t being polite. It was both.”

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The second time was last year.

And that time it was Fran who raised it.

Her hip, as it happens — the same joke went round the family for a fortnight — and a winter of it, and a fortnight in February when the path iced over and she did not leave the house for nine days.

She rang him on the Sunday night and said, “I’ve been thinking about four.”

There was a pause, and then Roy, who had been waiting three and a half years and who did not say so, said: “Right. Go on then.”

They talked for about an hour.

And at the end of it, Fran said no.