When Stephen had been there, when she was a girl, she’d thought it would always be like this. The nights with him would be just the beginning of her lifetime of adventures in the realm of pleasure. And there had been others, although not so many as she’d imagined there would be. And never so innocent, or so free. That was what she could not have foreseen. He hadn’t been the person she’d loved the most in her life, and yet those times with him she had been enraptured, giddy with the sudden possibilities of what bodies could do. She understood she would never experience that again, not now. No one would ever make her feel like that, so tingly and alive; so completely at home in her own skin. She might never be naked with someone again. She would never except in memory be that girl in the high room, naked and filled with new longing. A stranger, sitting opposite her in a train or at a dinner table, would see her just as she saw Hazel. Old. Not ancient, but old: old enough to be a grandmother. If they troubled to see her at all.

Adam came back into the room with more coffee. Dawn reappeared. They all waited while he handed out the cups and passed round a plate of biscuits.

Hazel spoke. ‘I’m going to be frank with you. There wasn’t a lot of love lost concerning your mother, as far as my family were concerned. She wasn’t very kind to Stephen, throwing him out on to the streets. The traffic accident wasn’t his fault: that other car came out of nowhere. We knew that: after the funeral Dad wrote to your father, to get it clear in his and Mum’s minds, and your father wrote back acknowledging that Stephen hadn’t been responsible. I read the letter just before I came over here, as a matter of fact.’

‘We weren’t sure that you knew about the accident. That’s what tipped our mother over, as far as having Stephen here was concerned,’ said Georgie.

‘Yes, well, there’s nothing we can do about that now. You were probably aware that Stephen had some mental health issues, that’s why he’d dropped out of school. Why he was travelling. He was vulnerable, you’d call it now. And your mother, she chucked him out. Wrote him a pretty horrible letter. The one nice thing she did was to give him that medal. So I wouldn’t be in too much of a hurry to take that away from her, if I was you. At least giving him that showed she’d welcomed him into the family. For a while, anyhow.’

‘She wasn’t easy,’ said Georgie. ‘I didn’t find out he’d gone until it was too late to say goodbye. I was broken-hearted when she made him leave.’

‘Right,’ said Hazel.