“Fuck it,” I snarled. I stepped on the pedal of the bin in the cupboard and threw in the dirty cup. But the bin was half full and stank, too, of what might have been rotten fruit. I got to my knees and began to root in the cupboard, pulling aside cardboard boxes and yellowed plastic bags.

“What are you looking for?”

“Bin liners. The whole damn place is a mess.” Everything seemed old, even the cans and plastic dispensers of cleaning stuff in the cupboard, old and dirty and crusted and half used up but never thrown out. My searching was getting more violent; I was scattering stuff around the floor.

“Take it easy,” Peter said. “Give yourself a minute.”

He was right, of course. I forced myself to back up.

He had left this, my father had, this little set of dirty dishes. He’d never come back to finish the tea. He’d just stopped, his life cutting off at that moment, like a film breaking. Now I had to tidy this stuff away, a chore I used to loathe as a kid: He never would clean up after himself. But when it was done, there would be no more, no more dirty cups and greasy crockery, not ever. And as I worked my way through the house, room by room, I would be fixing messes that he would never make again.

I said, “It’s as if he’s dying, a little bit more. Just by me doing this.”

“You had a sister. She was older than us, wasn’t she?”

“Gina, yes. She came over for the funeral. But she went back to America. We’re going to sell the house; we share it fifty-fifty, according to Dad’s will—”

“America?”

“Florida.” My maternal grandfather had been a GI, an Italian American, stationed briefly in Liverpool some time before the war. You might say my mother was a premature war baby, conceived during that stay. After the war the GI had not fulfilled his promise to come back to England. I told Peter all this. “But there was a happy ending,” I said. “My grandfather got back in touch sometime in the fifties.”

“Guilt?”

“I suppose. He was never a true father. But he sent money over, and took Mum and Gina over to the States a few times, when Gina was small. Then we inherited some property in Florida, left to my mother by a cousin she’d met over there. Gina went to work over there, took the house, raised a family. She works in PR—I’m sorry, it’s a complicated story—”

“Family stories are like that.”

“Episodic. No neat narrative structure.”

“That makes you uncomfortable.”

It was a perceptive remark I wouldn’t have expected from the Peter I’d known. “I suppose it does. It’s all kind of a tangle. Like a spider’s web. I felt as if I got myself out of it, by building a life in London. Now I have to get tangled up again.” And I resented it, I realized, even as I tried to finish these few last chores for my father.