They would think of it as that day in their minds, independently acknowledging that their relationships with each other had started their real transformation when they sat trapped in their separate spaces, unable to reach out to each other, unable to express outrage or assert innocence, unable to accuse, justify or recriminate. Silas on the pavement, Mikey lying on his back in his room, Lydia on the settee, her feet raised up on pillows, the way they had been after she danced on the broken glass. Each set in the gravel of their emotions, an individual resolve never to raise the subject of that day.

Lydia: ‘Let Silas suspect what he wants to, I know in my heart it is not true.’

Silas: ‘Let Lydia hide whatever there is to hide, it is not my shame, it is hers.’

Mikey: ‘Nothing happened, nothing.’

Silas did call out ‘Lydia?’ when he walked in, saw her on the settee, her eyes closed. He went closer, saw that she was asleep, leaned down over her, and smelled the sedative on her breath. A homeopathic formula he had bought to help him sleep. It contained a minute quantity of laudanum, that's what gave it this powerful smell. Upstairs, his feet pounding on the treads, loud, deliberate, a warning to Mikey to compose himself, should there be a need to.

He found Mikey at his computer, surfing the Internet, the website of an on-line bookstore on the screen.

‘Mikey?’

‘Oh, hi, Dad!’

‘Is Mom okay?’

‘Isn't she downstairs?’

‘Yes, asleep on the settee.’

‘She asked me to get her some water and that stuff you take, found it in your medicine cabinet. She looked tired, Dad.’

Mikey's bland face, concealed and concealing. He was beyond his father's reach, beyond any paternal love or revulsion or regret.

Silas asked Mikey to come and help him. His mother would have to sleep down there for a while, until her feet were completely healed. It would be difficult for her to climb the stairs each time she wanted to lie down or bath. Together they transformed Silas's study into a bedroom, the sleeper couch moved in from the living room and made up with white linen, which Mikey immediately thought of as ‘fine’, as if someone else had planted the word in his head. Silas brought Lydia's bedside lamp down from their room – ‘She likes the light it gives her when she reads’ – and set it up on an old ‘smoking table’ next to the bed. The neat piles of paper, briefing notes, press cuttings, pamphlets on the Truth Commission were unceremoniously scooped up into a cavernous old canvas bag and dragged to the storeroom at the back. Two vases of flowers – roses and daisies – brightened up the gloomy bookcase: sombre tomes that he hardly ever touched and that Mikey occasionally pulled out in order to inhale the musty fragrance of dust and leather binding.