She peered across at the Bradshaws’ nice new drive. The silver cars all slumbering as you looked down the hill, ahead of the supermarket trips or drives to country pubs which would make up their Saturday duties. The neat shuttered houses, green and brown bins outside; the absolute normality of it all. No reason, when she and Lee had gone to bed last night, to imagine anything outside that normality could jump on her like this. Of course not. Lee had watched a documentary about Pink Floyd, whose songs went on a bit, if you asked her, but he was happy. Jean had read a bit of her novel, which – like almost all the books chosen by her book group – was about a missing child. WHAT WOULD YOU DO? the blurb had asked, and Jean had thought how distant, how far from one’s real experience, the question seemed. How far-fetched these books always seemed.

And now this.

But the danger here was not of a kind that you could call someone to come and stamp out; it wasn’t in a shape which she could hold in her hands. Jean felt the swirling of her stomach again. Talking about ending his life. Why? He must be depressed, Sally had said. Or in ‘some sort of trouble’. And Jean had felt it like a slap, heard an accusation. She was always there for James to talk to. But how long, in fact, had it been? He wasn’t chatty on the phone. He wasn’t someone you could call for a weekly bulletin in the way she did with Sally.

Depressed about what? In what sort of ‘trouble’? It was appalling that she didn’t know, couldn’t even guess. Well. She could guess. Perhaps he still wasn’t over the mixed-race girl, if you were still allowed to say that; lots of things you weren’t allowed to say, nowadays, according to the younger members of the book group. Perhaps it was the job, money. She gathered that he wasn’t working for the taxi company any more, and even that job had been a bit of a comedown because the business went wrong, or he fell out with Michaela, or whatever exactly had happened there. But she could have given him money. She could have come up with job ideas for him, he could move back to Bristol, there were people hiring at the gym where Jean did Pilates, and at Boots, and that was just off the top of her head. Or perhaps it was his weight that was getting him down – but if that was the problem, there were so many diet plans.