Their grief, in a three-person huddle at the front, had been wildly and inevitably out of proportion with anyone else’s: with the kind-faced celebrant who was on his third funeral of the day, with the family friends and conscripted half-relatives who, Sally had said bitterly, were all just relieved not to be in the casket themselves. Yet, she added. James had grimaced at that. ‘I’m not sure we should use the day as – you know. As a recruitment drive for the next person to go.’ Sal had grinned through her tears, briefly. She and James had been texting each other dozens of times a day in the run-up to this horrible event, and he felt as close to his sister as he had since they were children. He squeezed Sally’s arm even harder and – because the curtain was closing, the final few seconds in Dad’s company were upon them – said, under his breath: I’ll make you proud, Dad. I’ll do something good.

When he looked back on that later, James hadn’t really known what he had meant by it. But, over the last year or so, he’d known with a deadening certainty that he was getting further and further from making it come true.

*

He could hear the conductor, if that was a phrase still in use, holding a conversation right outside his door. She’d been so full of energy when they boarded. ‘You’re in number four, and the toilets, if you need them, are …’ ‘You’ve got a first class there, which means you’re going right here, and then sort of back on yourself …’ He’d even wondered if she was always this chirpy; if, perhaps, working on a midnight train meant that the night became your morning. But the past couple of hours had seemingly taken a toll of some kind. Her voice was a stage whisper, hushed and intrusive at the same time. The voice of someone conscious of the need to be quiet – people were sleeping, after all – but constitutionally unsuited to the task. ‘There’s nothing I can do,’ she said, several times. ‘There is nothing I can do.’ The confined nature of the space – James’s head against the back wall, the Welsh woman just the other side of it – made it feel as if she were having the conversation in the same room as him, had wandered in for some reason.