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contents out on to the table: a battered purse, half a packet of Jaffa Cakes and a TV remote control. She began sorting through them, her hands jerking as she searched. Alarmed by her growing agitation, Rosie said, ‘What are you looking for, May? Can I help you find it?’
    ‘Keys, keys! Got to find my keys. Must be here somewhere. I have to get back or she’ll be getting in again, taking all my precious things. I have to hide them, lock them up!’
    ‘No one can get in, May, I promise you,’ Rosie said, thinking uncomfortably of the footsteps on the stairs. ‘All of your things are safe; I’ll take care of them.’
    May looked at her disbelievingly. ‘You can’t watch them all the time … She comes in and out, just as she chooses …’ She cast about for her keys amongst the objects on the table, knocking things to the floor.
    Rosie laid her hand on her arm and quickly picked up one of the silver-framed photos to try to distract her. ‘Where was this taken, May?’ In front of a caravan with an old-fashioned, round-cornered shape, a family group sat at a camping table spread with the remains of a meal. Rosie’s grandparents looked so young she almost didn’t recognise them: her grandfather in an open-necked shirt and with a glass of beer in front of him, and her grandmother holding a cigarette. May and Helena sat either side of them, both blonde and clearly sisters; May about eighteen, in a flowered sundress, a spotted hairband holding back her thick, back-combed hair and Helena, ten years younger, still a child in shorts with a pudding-basin haircut and a big smile for the camera.
    May stopped sifting through her belongings and took the picture from her. ‘Let me see; let me see.’ She passed her index finger over the glass as if the past was touchable. ‘Durdle Door, 1958, Clifftops Holiday Park,’ she rapped out. ‘You could walk down to the beach from the cliff path. It was beautiful, clean fine sand and the most amazing rocks standing out in the sea. I can see it in front of me, a huge …’ She moved her hands as if to describe a shape for which she’d lost the words. ‘Bent … a hole …’
    ‘An arch?’
    ‘Yes, that’s it. Not smooth, rough-cut, you know – by the waves. Helena and I went swimming every day, further along. We took a picnic. Helena got stung by a wasp by the bins and I put an ice cube on it to stop her crying …’ She tailed off.
    Rosie, amazed by this sudden flood of memory, tried to encourage her to say more. She had heard that dementia patients could often summon up detailed memories of the distant past even though they couldn’t remember what they’d had for breakfast that very morning. ‘Who took the photo?’
    May’s face softened. ‘He was the campsite owner’s son. He was called Stephen. We wrote for a while … then the next year Mum and Dad wanted a change and we went to Filey, then Scarborough the year after that.’ She put the photograph back on to the heap face down and turned to gaze out into the garden, her eyes sad, thoughts far away.
    Rosie took it and wrapped it in the piece of sewing saying, ‘It’ll save it from scratches.’ She imagined the holiday romance, walks along windy cliffs, stolen kisses at the door of the little caravan. How sad that they hadn’t gone back. She wondered how many other loves May had had and still regretted losing. She had thrown herself into her civil service career working in the Highways Department. Articulate and practical, she had risen in a man’s world. She had never married. Rosie carefully pinned the needle and thread into the fabric so that it wouldn’t get loose in the bag and prick May’s finger in her rummaging through her belongings. Like Sleeping Beauty, she thought, her brain making a strange connection to thorny thickets of briar enveloping a pinnacled castle where a girl lay dreaming of love; time stopped for her at sweet sixteen. She reached across and took her aunt’s hand.
    May looked at her