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70 WovenWords if she’d spent the whole night on the bench. I put my suitcase upstairs, filled my flask with boiling water in the kitchen, and headed off to work. That evening when I came home from the university, she was still there. ‘Sit down, boy!’ She slapped the space beside her. I perched beside her on the bench. I had a bag of groceries with me—more milk, more cornflakes and more bananas, for, my inspection of the kitchen earlier in the day had revealed no spare pots, pans, or cooking utensils. There were only two saucepans in the refrigerator, both containing some orange broth, and a copper kettle on the stove. ‘Good evening, madame.’ She asked me if I had checked the lock. I told her I had. For a moment she was silent. Then suddenly she declared, with equal measures of disbelief and delight as the night before, ‘There’s an American flag on the moon, boy!’ ‘Yes, madame.’ ‘A flag on the moon! Isn’t that splendid?’ I nodded, dreading what I knew was coming. ‘Yes, madame.’ ‘Say ‘splendid’!’ This time I paused, looking to either side in case anyone were there to overhear me, though I knew perfectly well that the house was empty. I felt like an idiot. But is was a small enough thing to ask. ‘splendid!’ I cried out. Within days it became our routine. In the mornings, when I left for the library, Mrs Croft was either hidden away in her bedroom, on the other side of the staircase, or she was sitting on the bench, oblivious to my presence, listening to the news or classical music on the radio. But each evening when I returned the same thing happened: she slapped the bench, ordered me to sit down, declared that there was a flag on the moon, and declared that it was splendid. I said it was splendid, too, and then we sat in silence. As awkward as it was, and as endless as it felt to me then, the nightly encounter lasted only about ten minutes; inevitably she would drift off to sleep, her head Reprint 2026-27