Gideon Frayne is sixty-two.

He is not tall and he is not imposing and he was wearing a grey suit that was obviously expensive in the way that means nothing about it announces anything.

He has a limp — a hip, I found out later, done in 2021.

He carried a cardigan for her.

He walked up that drive with my ex-wife on his arm, and about eleven people looked, and he did the thing that I have thought about ever since, which is that he steered her straight past all of them to a bench at the side of the courtyard and sat her down and stood in front of her for a minute with his back to the crowd.

He was blocking the view.