As it turned out, lunch happened to be a great success. Apart from the roast beef appearing from the oven in a state of readiness that Dan had always strived to achieve—a crispy coating of fat on the outside and succulently red in the middle—the meal was, as far as Dan could remember, the first for many a moon that had been conducted without one cross or needling word being fired across the table. That was, of course, the doing of Battersea Gran. When she had been married to Dan’s father, she had considered it her role in life to lavish him with praise and undying devotion (or “devoshun,” as she would pronounce it when warbling out one of her favorite songs, Johnny Tillotson’s “Poetry in Moshun”). However, since his death, that instinct had now been shifted onto her grandchildren, and in her simple, down-to-earth way, she always seemed able to extract from them the best of their characters. No matter what they did, it was always right by Battersea Gran—and they loved her for it. She was delighted by Josh’s ability to stack shelves in Tesco’s and intrigued by his visits to Horace’s Inferno; she became tearful with pride when, after lunch, she sat listening to Nina as she stuttered through the Braveheart theme on her flute; and, even though Dan had tried to admonish her for it, she roared with laughter at Millie’s stories of how she had been caught standing on top of the lavatory cistern in the school cloakrooms, blowing cigarette smoke up towards the Xpelair fan, or how she had given a one-fingered reply to the class geek when he asked her to go out with him.

As well as being a listener, Battersea Gran also had infinite knowledge of all things that interested the children, gleaned from the television in her flat. She knew more than either Dan or Josh about how Tottenham Hotspurs were doing in the league table, who scored the goals during their last match, and who the manager was lining up for his next multimillion-pound signing; she watched Top of the Pops every week so that she could baffle the girls with her knowledge of rappers and heavy metal bands and the endless stream of manufactured boy groups, girl groups, and mixed groups; and when Josh went to Manchester University (the first Porter ever to achieve this distinction), she would wake herself at five o’clock every morning to watch Open University. She even began to achieve a vague understanding of some of the complex mathematical problems that the ginger-moustached lecturer was writing down on his flipchart. But then she discovered that Josh was studying English, so thereafter she decided to give up her early morning vigils and just stick to the less erudite information that daytime television afforded her.