Glancing across at Lennie in the passenger seat, Robin caught her eye and got a smile. When she’d come downstairs this morning, she’d found her breakfasted and ready to go, earnestly wrapping a stack of Christine’s biscuits in a piece of tin-foil. ‘For the car,’ she said. ‘So we don’t have to stop.’ It had been another of those moments when Robin felt she’d been shown a glimpse of the future, a fleeting premonition of what life would be like in not even five years’ time. Len looked nearly grown-up today, in her boyfriend jeans and favourite T-shirt, a grey one with a black glitter lightning bolt across the chest, quite rock ’n’ roll, and she was tall, already five five. Robin was relatively tall though, at five seven, and Len’s father had been tall, too, so that wasn’t surprising.

‘How tall?’ said Corinna’s voice suddenly. She’d always leapt on the slightest new detail about him.

‘Six two, six three – something like that. Don’t know, he was lying down.’

‘Slapper.’

She took a silent breath, pushed the pain away. ‘You’re okay to keep going?’ she said. ‘You don’t want to stop at Oxford for a drink, or the loo?’

‘No, I’m okay.’

‘It’s the memory of that Burger King, isn’t it?’

‘Yeah. I’m scared you’ll force-feed me another one and this time I’ll burst.’

Robin smiled. The M40 moved past them on either side, ribbons of grey, busy even on a Saturday morning. It had been planned in the Sixties to link London and Birmingham, which amazed her now she thought about it – the Sixties. The part linking London to genteel Oxford had been made first, of course, but the last bit between Oxford and Birmingham had only opened in the early Nineties, not even thirty years ago. The capital and the country’s second city, that huge engine of industrial prosperity, with no direct link until then. Hard not to see it as an insult, as if London were leery of an open conduit for anything other than the money Birmingham generated.

‘Mum, do you miss Ade?’

Ade?

‘Adrian.’

‘I know!’ She made a face. ‘I know who Ade is. God, Len, I’m not senile yet. It was just the change of subject that—’

‘It wasn’t a change of subject. So do you?’

No lies – with the rider that if it was small and white and it would protect Lennie’s feelings, and no harm could come of it, very occasionally it was all right. ‘Yes. Of course I do.’

‘I do.’

‘I know, sweetheart.’