She thought of Stephen. Who would remember you, if you lived only half your life? Some amateur genealogist like herself, beavering away at family history, might chance upon your name, but that was all. Unless you were famous, there was no memorial for just an ordinary person. It seemed to Hazel that this was the trouble, with the dead. You either thought about them all the time, as she did now with her husband; or there was the risk that they were forgotten. Stephen was just a lanky red-haired kid who’d dropped out of art college. Once the people who had known him were gone, there would be no one and nothing to remember him by. Her mother had made her promise that she and Karen would tend to his grave after she was gone, but with Karen living so far off, the task had always fallen to her. She visited once or twice a year, on his birthday and latterly on their mother’s. But what would happen, when she died? Her kids had never met their uncle, she couldn’t expect them to traipse off to the cemetery for the rest of their lives. Hazel wished she could think of a way to keep his memory alive.

Hazel felt some apprehension about getting the box full of Stephen’s photographs and papers out, now that she no longer had Owen as an emotional bomb disposal operative. But somewhat to her surprise she found that there’d been a further shift in her feelings about her brother, in the years that had elapsed since her mother’s death. She appeared to have come to some kind of accommodation with him. This time she knew she would be strong enough to look through the photographs. She wasn’t getting any younger: if any pictures needed labelling, if the people in them wanted identifying, now was the moment.

She began to sift through the pictures of her brother. To her delight she found that, this time, she was pleased to see him. Yes, there was always the tinge of sadness, but now even the school photographs made her smile. A memory flashed into her mind, of sitting beside him at a table, drawing a little hand-made comic book together. Lord knew what had happened to it. She was intrigued to see a look of her own kids in some of her brother’s expressions, something she hadn’t remarked before. Strange to think that her two were older, now, than Stephen had ever become. Hazel thought that maybe it was time to discard the school reports; likely no one would ever want to look at them again. Her daughter Anna and son David might just about glance at their own parents’ old school stuff, but it was doubtful they’d be interested in these. His drawings and notebooks, though, those she would keep. She glanced through one or two of them.