Last summer's bluebottles litter the window cill, trapped between panes of glass. Dry, fragile, the bodies of moths and butterflies lay flat on the ledge, like sad pressed flowers.

Sunlight, weak and watered-down, catches the dust motes as they eddy in some imperceptible breeze. Old people's light.

The dust is everywhere. It cloaks the top of the dressing table, disturbed occasionally by fingerprints that must be yours. It dulls the lustre of the bottles of expensive perfume you no longer wear. It clings to the frames of photographs, discoloured by time, stained nicotine-yellow with regret. A soldier's faded sepia smile looks sad and lonely behind glass plate.

Your heavy silver hairbrush is tarnished and whatever shine it might still have is lost beneath the dust.

The carpet is thick with it. Its colour is muted to grey and the fabric is worn down to the underlay in a track between the door and your side of the empty bed: a path you've been walking since before I was born.

The pillow on the bed smells of the night cream you use: you can neither really afford nor justify it, but you use it all the same. Under the pillow, there will be the hard, knotted rope of your Rosary beads. I don't need to check for them: I know they'll be there.

From the walls, Jesus and the Virgin Mary look on compassionately through films of neglect. An old charcoal drawing of your daughter gazes into dusty middle-distance.

On the bedside table, your prayer books, Bible, a vial of holy water. None of it was quite enough.

The wardrobe door is half-open. I can see inside, the piles of once-beautiful shoes - glamorous, high-heeled - now abandoned and slowly decaying. A fur coat hangs in politically correct exile alongside dresses you'll never wear again.

Hair pins and rollers bristle in drawers. A few brittle, dyed strands wrap around pink plastic curlers, and setting lotions ferment silently in their bottles.

The walls seem to breathe into the room a loneliness that no amount of painting or re-papering will dispel.

This is your room.

That house was sold years ago, and has changed hands many times since. People have tried the house on for size, but you, it seems, were the only one whom it fit.

I saw you diminish and die, in the hospital, in the care home. I saw you buried on a dull December day, watched as a box that seemed far too small to contain who you were was lowered into the mud.

But I remember the coldness of your fur coat against my cheek, the smell of the musk you always wore.

Even now, in a room long gone with you, your fingerprints still trail in the dust.

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