I felt a visceral loathing for this man I did not know rising in my blood.

‘What?’ Edie said.

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘You need anything from the kitchen?’

A small buffet of sandwiches and cakes was set up in the kitchen, most of it hardly touched.

‘Stop fussing,’ Edie said, the words softened by her laughter, and I turned away with my face burning just in time to see Scout suddenly stop dead in her tracks.

Whitestone’s house was at the end of a terrace and you could see the street from the back garden. A car with a large yellow dog in the passenger seat was slowly coming down the quiet road.

The dog glanced our way, as if he was checking the house numbers. The car stopped and a middle-aged man emerged with the dog. It looked glad to be alive.

‘Dasher!’ Scout cried. ‘They’re here!’

Whitestone said something to her son and she went off to answer the doorbell. Justin stood there for a moment and then disappeared into the house. When Whitestone returned with Dasher and his walker – to cries of delight from our little party – her son was not with her. I looked up at the first floor and heard music drifting from one of the bedrooms.

‘Oh, Dasher,’ said Scout, weak with love at first sight, and when she scratched his ears you saw the good nature and intelligence of the dog, and his endless hours of training, and his total readiness to perform his new role. We gave the walker a paper plate of sausage rolls and a cup of tea and we all watched Dasher and Stan shyly performing their tail-sniffing introductions.

But although we waited and waited, Justin Whitestone did not emerge from the house. And when his mother went in to get him, we were not surprised that she returned alone, shaking her head, and holding back the tears.

‘That poor kid,’ Edie said to herself.

But Dasher brought real joy to the little garden.

Even after Dasher’s walker had said goodbye, the man choking back an unmistakable sense of loss, the mood was buoyant. Dasher seemed delighted to meet everyone, and he capered with Scout in his good-natured wake, with Stan trailing behind the pair of them, until they were all panting for breath and exhausted by the undiluted joy of it all.

It was only when darkness began to creep in that the truth hit us.

Dasher was a guide dog with nobody to guide.

The friends from the neighbourhood began to drift away. In the end, there was only our mob from West End Central, plus Edie’s grandmother and Scout.

‘Just is still getting used to the idea,’ Whitestone said, casting an anxious look at her son’s bedroom window. ‘I’m sure that after a bit …’

Her voice trailed off. She stared at Dasher.

‘My son doesn’t want him,’ Whitestone said eventually, something hard and fragile in her voice.