Aaron wanted to cap Joel’s hand with his own, or to turn his and interlace their fingers, but he was very conscious of the public place. “It’s nothing. Or, at least, it’s done. He wasn’t a bad man.”

“He sounds bloody awful.”

“No, truly. He never expressed a regret about taking me on. He gave us everything he could. When I was seven or so, a group of bigger boys was bullying me, and he came out and gave them what for, then laid into their fathers too when they came round. Absolutely furious, defending me to the hilt. My father looking out for me. I felt so safe in that moment.” He sighed. “And then he shouted, ‘Don’t you touch my wife’s boy,’ so there we were.”

“Defeat from the jaws of victory.” Joel kept his hand on Aaron’s a moment longer, then pulled it away, leaving Aaron’s skin bereft. “If not bloody awful, at least bloody difficult?”

“Definitely that. My mother said that he only knew how to love in the abstract. He loved ‘the people’ or ‘the workers’, and he loved the idea of taking on a fallen woman and her child. And he worked damned hard for us all, did his best, and sacrificed a great deal. There’s plenty who consider him something close to a saint, although they’re largely people who didn’t know him.”

“Ha.”

“But they knew what he did, and what you do is surely what counts, in the end,” Aaron said. “And I don’t expect any saints are easy to live with. It’s asking a lot of anyone to do so much and be cheerful about it.”

“Then he perhaps should have done less, better,” Joel said tartly. “Or stuck to labour disputes rather than raising children. I don’t have a great deal of time for grown men who can’t manage their own moods.”

“You’re not without a temper yourself,” Aaron felt compelled to observe.

“Oh, I am—I mentioned this, I think?—a stroppy bitch, but I try not to ask other people to soothe my feelings for me. I also don’t look after orphaned children or fight for workers’ rights, so perhaps I’ve no room to criticise those who do. I’m quite prepared to agree your father was a better person than me. But he sounds like a prick.”

Terry Fowler had loomed very large through Aaron’s life: a hero to some, a bogeyman to others, a constant presence for good or ill. Everyone had strong opinions on him; Aaron did himself. ‘Prick’ was a welcome deflation.

“Maybe a bit of one,” he said, and couldn’t help a smile, and Joel smiled back.

“You call him father,” Joel went on after a comfortable moment broken only by a last attack on the skeleton of the fish. “Not stepfather?”