‘I was never a Father,’ he told her in his lilting voice. ‘I was just one of the humble Lay Brothers, doing a bit of teaching and other jobs they found me. I was never anyone of importance, don’t go thinking that.’

She did not know why he had come home to his brother’s widow; perhaps because he had nowhere else to go and knew that she was alone and needed support. There was nothing for him in Ireland now, and he seemed to feel a duty to look after Vera.

‘It’s a terrible thing, your father going like that,’ he would say to her sometimes, shaking his head sadly. ‘God knows, a man in his prime like that, with a family.’ The implication was always that it should have been he who died instead.

Though in Uganda he had at some time been teaching young children, he never looked for the same work in England. He could not have managed it. But he did work – at any job he could find. He looked after Vera, in his way, and she him. Katie had also come to take for granted the mysterious mixture of rage, shame, regard and tenderness with which her mother seemed to regard him.

But she remembered those mornings, once or twice, when she was still quite small, waking to hear her mother weeping hysterically next door, in the tiny bedroom that was Patrick’s. They were living off Thimble Mill Lane by now, not in the first house they had when Daddy was alive, which was bigger and in a better area because Daddy was an engineer, who’d been through all his apprenticeship. They had come down in the world. Her mother had been left in poverty, that was all she knew, like Enid Thomas, their neighbour, who had lost both her husband and son in the Great War.

‘Please,’ Vera was shrieking desperately, ‘Get up, for pity’s sake.’

Katie crept to the door, her thumb in her mouth. Patrick slept on a mattress on the floorboards in the barest of rooms, insisting that he didn’t need more. He was used to Africa, to having very little, and seemed to feel he deserved even less. He was lying curled tight on his side, and Vera had hold of his arm. She was down on one knee in a posture utterly unlike her usual reserved dignity, tugging frantically at him.

‘You’ve got to. What’s the matter with you, in heaven’s name? Just lying here – get yourself up!’ Another tug on his arm. ‘You’re already late – they’ll sack you if you keep this up, and then where will we be? I’m hardly getting any work living in this slum – we’ll end up in the gutter!’ She stopped pulling at him and put her hands over her face, breaking into deep sobs. ‘I can’t do everything: I can’t manage . . .’

Her tears seemed to get through to him and Katie saw Patrick sit up as if it pained him, as if a pile of lead weights had been heaped upon him. He dragged his hands down over his hollow face. He looked so sad, but all he said was, ‘All right, all right, Vera. I’m up now. Don’t be shouting. Just leave me be.’