They have tea together. Despite his air of enthusiasm he says very little, and she finds herself prodding and poking him, as a child will take a stick to some mammal it finds lying by the side of the road. Any moment, she thinks, her poking will roll him over and she’ll see his belly, the bloodied fur writhing with maggots. But instead, unwittingly triggered by some word she utters, he does what roadkill never does: he leaps up and springs away.

Finlay? she calls after him.

Sorry, he says from another floor. Just had an idea.

She presumes he has gone to get something to show her; will return any moment. She stares at the dog and the dog stares back. After five minutes, it is clear he’s not coming.

She finds his feet on the top rungs of the aluminium loft ladder. The rest of him, invisible to her from the landing, is scuffling around in the boxes that crowd round the hatch.

What’s up? she says.

Is it mania? This is more like the behaviour she was expecting. Where did you put it? he says. The Christmas box.

It was Christmas, then. Christmas was the word that had set him off.

You mean the decorations? she asks.

Yes, the decorations, he says. Now his head appears and he looks at her intently. The Christmas decorations box.

Oh, she says.

He doesn’t need more than that syllable to tell him further searching will be fruitless. His head disappears back into the hatch. The light goes off. He is not searching now. He is just breathing.

It was all getting a bit tatty, she says. There didn’t seem any point keeping it.

His body appears to be vibrating. The house is quiet. Downstairs, the refrigerator’s motor has just come on, rattling the champagne flutes she stores on top. Finlay comes down the ladder slowly, deliberately.

There were a couple of things in there, he says, reaching for the hooked pole propped by their bedroom door. Things the kids made when they were little. You remember them? Pushing up the ladder so it folds back on itself. That gold-foil angel that Flora made for the tree? Tom’s Santa with the cotton-wool beard?

She remembers the Santa. The angriest Santa she’d ever seen. His face the same colour as his suit, and a huge black hole of a mouth. Ho ho ho.

I didn’t, um—

She didn’t think. Preparing for the move, she’d opened the box and seen only what was on top: the Sellotaped foil garlands with snapped-off ends, the faded, crumpled paper chains that had served several years instead of a single season.

I didn’t—

What? What’s her excuse? This is it, now, isn’t it? This is the point where he’ll flip.