Matilda had lived for seventy-five years, and she wasn’t afraid of bad news. She had heard it before, and she had always survived it, and she’d learned that bad news is part of being alive, and thus should not be resented. Anyway, at seventy-five most news is neither good nor bad, but simply something to accept. She thought she knew what the boy would say, but she bit her lip and kept her thoughts to herself. She wanted to hear how her puzzling guest, with his eccentric etiquette, might put the momentous fact into words. “What is it?”

The boy’s grey eyes roamed the room – across the mantel with its clocks and statues, over the walls with their paintings and picture rails, down to where Peake had flattened out before the heater – before returning, like dark clouds, to her. He declared the matter without evasion: “Your house smells like old people.”

Matilda blinked, surprised and deflated; her emotions, which had grown grand as a symphony in an instant, fell down like skittles, and she felt a little bereft and nonplussed. But she reminded herself that the boy was only a child, and his childish impudence made her smile. She hesitated several moments to prove she was taking him seriously; then, although she knew the answer, having once been a child herself, she asked, “What do old people smell like?”

“Like coats in mothy cupboards.” He winced in revulsion. “Like cold porridge in a bowl. Like taps dripping for years and years. That’s how they smell.”

Matilda said, “How awful.”

“I’ve been sitting here for ages, waiting for you, almost choking to death!” The boy quaked with frustration. “Why are you like this?” he demanded to know.

“I don’t mean to be.” Matilda couldn’t help laughing, everything was so bizarre. The afternoon was turning out very differently from what she’d imagined. She would not be able to finish reading the novel she’d set aside. “A person gets used to their own smell, I suppose, and doesn’t notice it. I should have kept a window open. It’s unforgivable to smell like a tap.”

“You think it’s funny.” The boy scowled. “Don’t you care? You should hate it – being so wrinkly, walking so slowly, none of your fingers straight. No one looks at you any more, all your colours have gone. Doesn’t that make you angry? Doesn’t it make you sad? Isn’t it horrible, being old?”

Matilda considered her hands, which were dotted with spots and crimped with lines and lumpy with thick veins. Her fingers had once been smooth and white as piano keys. She said, “Being old is sometimes painful, but it isn’t horrible. It’s just what I am. When I was a girl, I looked in a mirror and saw me. Now I’m old, but when I look in a mirror, the person I see is still me. I’m not graceful or pretty any more, but maybe I am something else – something just as good, or better. Once I was an acorn, now I’m an oak tree.”

The boy snorted, unimpressed by trees. “I bet when you were a little girl, you thought old things were horrible.”

Tea-leaves floated in a penny-sized pool of tea in the bottom of Matilda’s cup. “Everything that’s young is troubled by what is old,” she admitted. “When I was small, there was an elderly woman who lived at the bend of the road. She never said an unkind word to me, she never even looked at me, but I was frightened of her. She was so withered, so crumpled. I knew she had once been a small girl too, but I couldn’t believe it. She was oldness, and nothing else. She was like an abandoned nest you find in a bough, tatty and disintegrating to dust. Even now, the memory of her makes me shiver. It is strange, that oldness is so hard to love or forgive.”

“Well, do you love it, now that you’re old?”

Matilda gazed into her cup. She thought about the child she had been, and the person she was now. When she was young, she had sometimes felt old, as if she’d been born and lived life many times. As she’d grown older, she had often felt as inexperienced and easily fooled as a toddler. Time and wisdom were tricksy things. Hearing the silence, Peake lifted his head and stared at her; then stared long and hard at their visitor before laying his head down again. “Young people think oldness is the bottom of a mountain,” Matilda said finally. “In truth, it is the top. I am old, because I have lived a whole life. I have climbed a long, long way. When I look back the way I have come, I can see the town I was raised in, and my mother and father. I see houses I lived in, friends that I made, people and pets that I loved. I see the wrong turns I took, places where I tripped, places where I skipped and sang and ran. I can see for years and years. To have such a view, you have to be standing on top of a mountain. The top is a difficult place to be – it’s windy and it’s perilous, and lonely sometimes – but it is the top, and there’s nowhere else to go.”

The boy had curled up on the settee while Matilda spoke, propping his chin on his palm. When she fell silent, he unexpectedly smiled. Smiling curved his eyes into crescents, so he looked like a sunny creature from a birthday card. Matilda guessed he was probably a clever boy, full of wit and curiosity, a thorn in his teacher’s side, a ringleader of his friends. When his mother asked him to do something, he did it well, although only after the correct degree of complaint. “Are you warmer now?” she asked.

The boy glanced at the heater, where the row of flames was doing its agitated dance behind spindly metal bars. The dancers were blue and orange, tossing their heads and swinging their hips and kicking up their feet. His nose was no longer pink, and it creased when he shook his head. He raised a hand and pointed, saying, “From the top of the mountain, do you see a girl in a boat?”

On the sideboard behind Matilda stood a brown-and-white photograph glassed inside a silver frame. In the photo, a slim young lady in a long oilskin coat stood at the helm of a spry white boat. The boat’s canvas sails were rolled, but a breeze was blowing the girl’s dark hair about her shoulders and face. All around the girl and the vessel bucked a playful sea, and the boat was anchored into place at the end of a taut rope. It was impossible to decide if the photograph was a picture of a sailing boat, or the portrait of a girl.

Matilda did not bother turning in her chair – she knew what the photograph looked like. “Yes,” she said, “I see that girl. She is the one I see all the time, whether I’m looking for her or not.”

“She’s you, isn’t she?”

“She was me – when I wasn’t an acorn or a tree, but somewhere in between.”

“Were you a sailor?”

Matilda shrugged. “When you’re old, there are a lot of things you have been. A tree is just a single thing, but it has different branches. All the branches are important – all of them make up the tree. On one of my branches, I was a sailor. Although, in truth, more a searcher than a sailor.”

“What were you searching for?”

Matilda paused, wanting the right words. “I searched for the answer to a question. I sailed the world trying to find it, and eventually I did. But some answers don’t finish a quest – they merely start it. If everything had been finished back then,” she told her visitor, “I don’t think you would be here.”

The boy reached out and took a biscuit, broke it into pieces, and ate it in several resolute bites, as if to show that, now he was here, he did not intend leaving until he was good and ready. “And where would you be?” he asked, eyeing her steadily. “Would you be here, sitting in this room, with just a dog to keep you company?”

“Who knows?” Matilda contemplated the walls, the crowd of cold ornaments. “The view from the mountain top is good, but you can only see clearly the road you took to reach where you stand. The other roads – the paths you might have taken, but didn’t – are all around you too, but they are ghost roads, ghost journeys, ghost lives, and they are always hidden by cloud.”

The boy’s grey gaze wandered over her face. In the shallow wrinkles of her skin were whispers of the girl Matilda had been. The boy himself was unmarked and flawless, nobody except himself. “I would like another biscuit,” he said sombrely. “I would like more tea.”