‘What? No!’ Jean almost laughed. She reached for his hand. ‘I mean, someone to talk to. A … a professional, counsellor sort of person.’ It was a stranger, bigger thing to say out loud than it had been in her head. ‘You don’t often get a chance to … think about what you’re feeling. Do you. People our age.’

‘Oh! Oh, I see what you mean.’ Lee felt himself exhale. That certainly would have been a very harsh way for her to do it – but it had happened to him before, after all. He hadn’t known Fiona was leaving him until she was next to someone else on a wedding seating plan. ‘No, that sounds like a good—’

‘People now do it all the time,’ said Jean, trying out the idea, warming to it as it took shape. ‘I think most people, if they’d had the sort of pregnancy I had – and if they’d had the sort of time I had when James was a baby. Well, for the first years, really. Now, you’d talk to someone about it. But it just wasn’t really – it wasn’t seen as being anything unusual.’ She wasn’t sure it even had been anything unusual. She hadn’t known what was happening, at the time. Just a tunnel, a lot of mornings she couldn’t get out of bed and had to ask Alan to get both kids to nursery, to school, to the Downs. Times she would put James’s food in front of him and he’d throw it on the floor and she was horrified by the fury that welled up inside her. But that was what people said it was like, being a parent. It had come as a shock because it hadn’t been so hard with Sally – that was the thing. Jean had secretly thought she was just better at it than the people who complained. Until she had James.

‘Well, it’s definitely something to look into.’ This was one of Lee’s favourite phrases; it could be substituted for action almost indefinitely. But Jean wasn’t talking about what might be nice to look at. She blinked several times.

‘Because they think, don’t they, that things can have an effect for years and years. If you don’t discuss them or … or sort them out at the time.’

There were so many problems that she hadn’t even known existed, or at least had never articulated to herself, when she and Lee had gone to bed last night. As recently as that. It was startling to be learning this now – to find that in the space of a few hours, so much could become new and unfamiliar. It was striking and odd to feel that way at her age. She felt as if she’d been picked up and spun around. She could learn from everything that happened tonight; there was still time to learn.