Their last big, fun dinner together had been four years ago. Incredible to think it could be that long, but Sal was in Australia, of course, and then there was the falling-out, and the worry (I don’t know how to get Sal to like me again) had calcified into a load, a burden (I can’t get her to). In much the same way as so many other small troubles had, nourished by his silence, grown into bigger and stronger things, into the things he suddenly found he couldn’t live alongside any more.

Four years. They’d been on good form that night, James and his big sister; they had had to be. The scattering of the ashes in Edinburgh had been an occasion they’d planned for a long time, and almost jauntily; there was a jauntiness, in fact, to their behaviour throughout the day. This was because of an unspoken pact to maintain each other’s spirits, and to act as a joint counterweight to Mum’s. Mum had been withdrawn, almost wordless, on the early morning train they caught to Edinburgh, resistant to the whole exercise – to their referring to the little box as ‘Dad’, speaking to it, to their texting little messages back and forth about the other passengers and sniggering. To the whole notion of scattering him, saying goodbye, in this way, although he had repeated his wish more than once after telling James. James and Sal understood it, of course – the grief, the massiveness of the blow. But the real goodbye had already happened. The funeral day had been the day for tears. We have to make it a happy day this time, Sal had said, and James, pining to see her even though it had only been a couple of months, agreed.