‘Oh, Pax, I wish I’d known all this.’

‘Why? We never spoke; we were living in the Borders, you were in Germany. Alice knew, and she was kind, but there’s not much one can say, is there?’

There was a great deal, Ronnie thought, she and Pax needed to say, but not right now. She could see how much the effort of talking about it had already cost her. ‘I like the name Kester; it’s Lester one removed.’

Pax slowly clapped. ‘You’re the first to get that.’ She smiled briefly, glancing round the little hallway then back to her mother, both acknowledging the man who had been so important in their parallel childhoods. ‘I’ve never once called him Oliver. Mack and his parents tried Olly for a bit, but it never stuck. He’s Kes.’

‘But he thinks of his brother Oliver as his alter ego?’

She nodded. ‘Mack hates it, and I try to discourage it, but the truth is I don’t mind that much.’

‘Because it brings Oliver to life,’ Ronnie guessed.

Pax’s eyes brightened, surprised at being understood.

Ronnie couldn’t resist reaching out a hand. This time, Pax let it rest on her arm.

‘I’m so glad you’re here,’ Ronnie said with feeling, alarmed to find a lump in her throat as big as a tennis ball.

‘Talking is good,’ Pax acknowledged with a half laugh, withdrawing. ‘Much as it pains me to admit, Luca was right about that.’

‘I’m glad you two are making friends.’

‘You ordered him to be nice to me which is quite a different thing. Now he’s glued to me like a buddy programme. But he is right about talking. There are donkeys with no hind legs everywhere that man’s been.’ Pax did her walk to the fridge door handle and back again, pausing to straighten a picture of a bowler-hatted rider on a shiny show cob and say, ‘Sorry, Lester.’ They could both quietly imagine his horror at such intimate conversations taking place on his quarry tiles.

‘He’d be jolly chuffed to know Kes was named in his honour.’ Ronnie watched Pax opening and closing the glass cupboard now, without taking one out. ‘Les and Kes has a wonderful music hall ring about it, don’t you think?’

‘It was Lester’s shoulder I cried on after losing Oliver.’

Ronnie masked her surprise. Lester was many things, but a good listener?

‘I came here for a few days not long after it happened. Mack didn’t know what to do with me because I couldn’t stop crying. Neither did Granny or Grumps, but Lester was very kind.’

‘Oh, he is kind.’ She could imagine him polite, poker-backed and dutiful while the older Percys hid away.

‘He told me something about Daddy, something he said nobody else knew.’

Ronnie stiffened.

‘He said my grandmother, Johanna, had a baby after Daddy who died at just a few days old; apparently she never got over it. Maybe that’s why she drowned herself.’

Ronnie had to forcibly stop herself snapping that Lester hadn’t known Johanna, they none of them had, and that Johnny had never breathed a word of it to her. Lester had always been a terrible myth-monger. And yet he’d also had Johnny’s confidence, letters passing between the two men for years despite barely a word spoken.