She pulled the dog-eared little book toward her. She didn’t pick it up, but turned the pages with the tips of her thumb and forefinger. It was as if I had presented her with her afterbirth pickled in a jar. She said coldly, “Thanks.”

I was irritated, with her and myself. “Shit, Gina. Why do we find it so hard to get on? Even at a time like this. I’m not here to fight—”

“Then why?” she said coldly.

“For Rosa,” I said without hesitation. I was satisfied to see how her smoke-filled eyes, so similar to mine, widened.

That was when the boys burst in, to our mutual relief.

“George!” “Hey, Uncle George . . .”

Michael was ten, John twelve. They were wearing summer gear, T-shirts, shorts, and huge, expensive-looking trainers. Michael had some kind of complicated Frisbee under his arm. I actually got a hug from Michael, and a punch on the shoulder from his older brother, hard enough to hurt. From those two I took whatever I could get.

I could see their gazes wandering around the kitchen. “Go to my hire car and take a look in the boot.”

“The trunk,” they chorused.

“Whatever. Go, go.”

I always enjoyed playing the indulgent uncle, if only because I had a knack of spotting presents that suited my nephews’ tastes. John always seemed a little duller than his brother, and would be content with computer games and the like, passive entertainments. But little Michael was always a tinkerer. Once I found an old Meccano set—an antique from the sixties, from my own childhood, but in mint condition. Michael had loved it.

My gifts didn’t work quite so well this time. I’d bought them both robot-making kits. You’d put together a motor and wheelbase with a processor you could command via a PC interface, so producing a little beetlelike creature that could scuttle around the room, avoiding chair legs. The beetles could even learn simple tasks, like how to push a table-tennis ball up a ramp. But in the better American schools they build critters like this for homework. The boys dutifully played with the kits for a while, though.

We ate lunch, a simple but typically delicious fish salad—my sister was annoyingly good at everything—and Gina sent us all outside the house.

Over the immense back lawn we chased Michael’s Frisbee back and forth. He had modified it: it had a series of round holes carved neatly around its perimeter. It shot through the air like a spinning bullet. More engineering: later Michael showed me a whole collection of modified Frisbees, kept in a box under his bed.