Quote tattoo reading 'Happiness only real when shared'

Her grandmother used to say the old tower on the hill had a keeper who ate alone, grew thin and sour, and that happiness went off in a shut cupboard like bread. Nell had never believed a word of it. She knocked at the open door, and when nobody answered she pushed it wider and found Mr Abioye sitting at a table laid for four, a pot going cold on the hob.

"My wife is at her sister's in Leeds," he said, as if she had asked. "The boy is at football. I made too much, as always." She sat. They ate lentils and bread, and he told her the tower had been built by men who thought people would be happier lifted up and away from each other. Nell said that was daft. He agreed, and poured her a second cup from a pot with a chipped spout.

When she finally left, the stairwell lights had gone out on every floor below him. Scratched into the paint beside his door, where some child had written it years ago with a door key, were the words she had been turning over all evening: HAPPINESS ONLY REAL WHEN SHARED. She went down slowly, one hand on the cold rail, and at the bottom she found she was no longer counting the landings, only the doors she could knock on.