‘He said: “Do you know what the five most chilling words in the English language are?” I asked what. And he said: “Pull my nightie down afterwards.”’

There was a silence. West Side Story was playing, but I couldn’t hear the words. I gazed at the wheel.

‘He didn’t tell me any of this until he was in hospital. I used to visit him, and that’s when he talked. He’d never told me anything before but he knew he was going to die. Ridiculous, really, because by that time he could hardly speak.’ I paused, and watched the lights pulse on the radio. ‘He had lung cancer.’

A moment passed. The motorway was empty.

Hilda said: ‘You poor love.’

She patted the seat beside her. I got up, moved across the aisle and sat next to her. She shifted her knitting and I leant against her. She was too small, so I snuggled down in my seat and leant my cheek against her shoulder. It felt soft and upholstered.

‘Don’t want to be like him, do you?’ she asked.

I shook my head.

She fished inside my anorak pocket and pulled out my packet of cigarettes.

‘Like father, like son,’ she said.

‘I’m not!’ I cried. ‘Really I’m not.’

She opened the door and threw the cigarette packet out.

‘Litterbug, Hilda!’ she said to herself.

And the I went back to my seat and we drove on.

That’s how I gave up smoking. By two o’clock we had joined the M2, the Dover road. I was back in Kent, where I was born and grew up; where I had lived as a married man. It had pulled me back, as if something hot and alive was drawing in its breath. It felt odd, as if all this time I hadn’t really travelled at all. Only my mileometer and my aching back told me I’d been on the road for a week. And there was Hilda, of course, who hadn’t existed until this weekend. She was the only person alive who knew about my sister.

They were going to call her Mary, my sister. She would be thirty-nine now, and looking in the mirror for wrinkles. By speaking about her aloud, I suddenly missed her. Of course we would have been friends. She would be that woman who liked doing the crossword. She would have taught me how to live, just as Edward would have taught me. On and off, all these years, I had wondered about her in the same way I had wondered about my son—would she have had freckles, would she have laughed at my jokes? Like Edward, every possibility existed in her.

Edward lay sleeping in Deal. I had made the phone ring in his house. Now I knew he was there, for a certainty, it seemed dangerous for us to meet. Did I even want to?