Not that she ever stopped thinking about him, let alone caring: you couldn’t forget your own son any more than you could forget your right leg. And yet the leg analogy was sort of accurate. The act of parenting, as you and the children got older, was more automatic than consciously engaged in. Especially when they weren’t close at hand or on the phone. And especially when the years went as fast as all her friends tediously, but accurately, kept pointing out they did. And so, when something went wrong with one of your children – out of the blue, or rather out of the purple-black of the night outside – it was no easier to anticipate than if you woke up and found one of your limbs wouldn’t move any more.

Jean thought she heard something on the landing above. More sentimental friends of hers, or friends even more bereft by a loss than she was, sometimes raised the idea that the lost husband – in one case, daughter – was still ‘with them’ on some plane; every creak of floorboard or branch scratching a windowpane was a message of comfort. One of the book group had claimed a supernatural bond like this two months ago, when they were meeting at Jean’s, and Rosamunde Pilcher hadn’t got a look-in all evening, somewhat annoyingly as Jean had speed-read the final hundred pages to be ready. What was undeniable, though, was that houses never lost the imprint of the people you’d lived with there. She could never sit on the sofa without thinking she saw Alan there, snorting at the weather forecast. She’d never been able to move the framed print of all the cloud types that hung in the bathroom, even though she couldn’t really look at it, either. She still thought, when she was alone in the house, she could hear Sally in the bedroom, practising one of her speeches (‘and that’s why this house should vote that the twenty-first century will belong to women’). Or James in the other bedroom, on the computer with one of his friends.