‘I think I should get a mobile phone, as well,’ she said.

‘We can get you one of those,’ Lee said. This was more like it. Something he could advise her on, and buy from a shop. Perhaps the ‘we’ was being too presumptuous, but Jean didn’t seem to mind. She had rested her head on his shoulder.

‘It would just stop me feeling like I’m not part of things,’ said Jean, though the sentence didn’t sound like something she would have said twenty-four or even twelve hours ago. ‘You know. It’s a big world.’

Lee nodded. It was a big world, though he personally hadn’t been further than Greece and he’d found it a bit too muggy for his liking.

‘Oh,’ said Jean, ‘also, I think you need better trousers than those.’

They looked down together at Lee’s long legs, at the brown chinos bought from House of Fraser more than ten years ago; slightly too tight now, and slightly too short from the moment he glanced in the fitting-room mirror and said, ‘Yes, these are perfect.’

‘So.’ Lee cleared his throat again. ‘So the list, just to be clear: get you a counsellor, a therapist, whatnot. Get you a phone. And get me some better slacks.’

She smiled, despite everything. Outside, there was a faint rattle of gravel and the purring of a car out of one of the neighbours’ drives. It would be the Bradshaws. They were always up early and going off rambling around the Lake District, back again the Sunday night; excursions which seemed a lot of hassle to Jean. But it would be nice. To have a plan.

‘It’s just the helplessness,’ said Jean, looking in grievance at the phone on the table, her useless ally with its big thick cord. ‘It’s just feeling that – I mean he could be in his flat and I wouldn’t know, he could be somewhere in Bristol for all we know, really – who knows what he might need, if he’s in such a state.’ She imagined her son, trudging around the streets, perhaps injured or under the influence of some drug she didn’t even know about – because that would explain all this, wouldn’t it. The sort of person you might walk past on your way out of the Hippodrome, in town, and think: How do people end up like that? He must have a mother.