Gordon started for the internal stairs. Up North, he had come to the cliff ’s edge of the big explanation session, which was what their holiday was meant to be about, but he had failed to take the leap. How to explain to any sixteen-year-old, let alone one with Ben’s peculiarities, the logic of the separation? Ben seemed tougher on Kelly than on Gordon (if you asked Kelly), but possibly he was tougher on Gordon than on Kelly (if you asked Lou). Whenever Ben tried to blame his mother for what happened, Gordon deflected responsibility to himself, saying he had given Kelly plenty of reasons to lose patience. Ben didn’t seem to take this in, but you never knew how much Ben was taking in. As Jude Oxenford put it at parent-teacher night, ‘It’s not that Ben isn’t highly intelligent—he is—it’s just that the input and output jacks are not where we usually find them.’ And whose, Gordon had silently replied, were?

LOU

Lou

Gordon tromped upstairs to reclaim his house from their clubhouse. At the top of the stairs, he took the banister newel from his pocket and screwed it back into its place, but could tell, from the lack of resistance, that he had lost the thread. Unable to bring himself to consider another handyman job, he left it there to wobble in wait for its next victim.

Dog held court over Red Cap and Josie, who were at the card table working on a jigsaw puzzle of Van Gogh’s Starry Night.

‘And after he drops in the second time, he goes, “I’m a local, I’ve lived here five years!” And I go, “Try fifty years, champion.” That shut him up. Nothing gets up my nose,’ Dog concluded, ‘more than blow-ins who act like they own the place.’

‘Cos it’s your job to act like you own the place,’ Josie said, without looking up from the jigsaw.

Josie had popped in earlier that day to ask Red Cap for a lift to the shops but her plans had been derailed by free food and the irresistible pull of the two-thousand-piece Van Gogh. Josie and Red Cap formed a mother-son tableau that would have been touching if not for their constant bickering over jigsaw puzzle technique. Red Cap was a systematiser, piling the edges and corners and separating them by colour, laying the groundwork before joining pieces, whereas Josie operated on instinct, trying connections if they ‘felt right’. Red Cap had just gone to the trouble of separating two pieces that had come joined, due to a factory error, by their paper backing. ‘Why do you have to make things harder for yourself?’ Josie said. Her fifty-one-year-old son, unemployable and a convicted criminal, replied, ‘It would be unethical.’