Out by the roundabout, a truck downshifts. Anton sips his fizzy drink, brings himself under control. He’d talked about it from time to time with the others, what he would do once he was back here.

‘Go straight to your local boozer. Get yourself a pint,’ Danny had told him.

Jim, Salim, Fat Eric – they’d all agreed. A pint and a slap-up meal somewhere. Steak and chips. A nice curry. Only Nigel had advised keeping himself to himself for a few days. ‘Run yourself a hot bath,’ he’d advised. ‘Relax yourself back into things.’

Of all of them, Nigel had understood him most.

But the house, as well as being his old home, is a receptacle of painful memories. Every room Anton goes into bears some evidence of the life he had once lived there. A picture, a smell, a stain.

At school, there had been a teacher who drove into them the maxim that you cannot step into the same river twice. Heraclitus. Anton has always had a fondness for the Greeks. All is change. Life is flux. And yet in the house it feels like stasis, as if time stopped the day he’d left. The furniture, the clock in the hall, the teacups in the kitchen cupboards, the linen on the bed: all of it preserved, like the charred mummified remains found in Pompeii and Herculaneum. Perhaps he should sell it. Sell it all. Hand over the keys to an estate agent and take himself off to some B-and-B until it’s done. But what then? Where could he possibly go?

He finishes his drink, looks at the paper. His eyes pass over the headlines, before he flips to the financial pages. He finds the mutual fund quotation tables, pores over them – an old habit. It had been his one vice, playing the stock markets. A form of gambling, Charlotte had called it, and she had been right. All is flux. The climb and swooping falls of fortunes played out in tiny-print columns. Saturday mornings spent scanning the pages of the FT, making calculations in his head, his losses and gains. It was no fun unless you had skin in the game.

He recalls then how she would breeze past him in her dressing-gown, casting a bored glance in his direction as she opened the freezer. It was only after she had wrapped ice in a tea-towel and pressed it to her head that she would breathe: ‘Haven’t you anything better to do?’ The smell of last night’s cigarettes clinging to the air.

The pages of his newspaper flutter, but there’s no breeze. The air is perfectly still.

It’s his hands that are shaking, sweat moistening his fingertips, making the ink run against his skin.