An old lady is telling us the story of her life. From her rattan chair she removes the cable-knitted cosy from the pot and serves us tea. She speaks of her first marriage at the age of sixteen. Her husband died tragically of an untreatable illness the following year and she married again at twenty. She says she began smoking in 1920 and has puffed through a packet a day for eighty-three years. She smokes a good deal while she’s talking, but she doesn’t inhale.

What holds her here? Tea. Cigarettes. The past mostly; the past and a few relationships. Continuity of heart, she also says, which lives alongside memory. How much memory? Let us investigate the documents of her date of birth; baptismal and church records; age at marriage; time until the birth of her children; the present ages of her offspring. According to her account, her father died at a hundred; her mother at a hundred and two. She had seven brothers and sisters, but she is the only survivor. Her son from her second marriage was born when she was twenty-nine and is now seventy-nine. We do the maths:

Twenty-nine and seventy-nine makes her one hundred and eight.

She was married for the second time at only twenty, ten years after the outbreak of the First World War, which began eighty-nine years ago now. Again we do the maths:

Twenty plus eighty-nine minus ten. Now she’s ninety-nine.

We know she started smoking in 1920, when her younger brother died at the age of twenty, from a wound sustained during the Great War. He was seven years older than she.

Eighty-three plus twenty minus seven makes her ninety-six.

Her second husband, who was five years younger than she, died some twenty-eight to thirty years ago aged seventy-five. We work it out.

Twenty-nine plus five plus seventy-five makes one hundred and nine.

I myself have never been good at ages and find her impossible to gauge; she changes age by the minute! We drink our tea and realise that no one, not one of us, knows which of her truths is true. What is more we realise, no one, not even she, cares.