Steven was not usually a nervous child but he was wary of Magnus when he first came home from the hospital—aware, in that strange, knowing way of very young children, that his father’s smile was painted on, his jolly words as empty as the skin of a seaside balloon.

Dada’s home! I winced at the strain in my own voice as I held Steven up for a kiss.

Clementina pushed Hal and Jessie forward, and they were cautious too, though less agitated than Steven. So it was up to us, Clementina and me, to ease the way back in for Magnus, welcome him to the home he was returning to for a second time.

The first thing Magnus Tulloch did next day was cycle to Castlemaine to see about getting his job back, or any other job. I put aside my worry about him, weak and wavering all over the road, and tried to take it as a lightsome sign. That it meant his priorities were clearer to him now. D’ye think so? I asked Clementina.

She patted my arm, looked at me hard, waiting for me to catch up.

I didn’t, not straight away.

He came home with good news: a job in the store-room again. And wasn’t that cause to be happy? Aye. But when the first pay packet came home, a mockery of what it was supposed to be, I knew the truth about Magnus Tulloch’s priorities.

He was still as thin as kindling, in spite of Clementina’s best efforts. His face stippled like Mintlaw mushrooms. Often he refused the aspirin. What’s the point? he’d say. What was the point when never would it stop, like a mallet on barrel hoops, over and over, and he would shake his head, as before, as though trying to dislodge something, trick the rhythm of the clanging into another beat, to change it, or quieten it for a while. But other times, he would swallow more pills from his palm than could possibly be safe, and then he would shrug and say it again: What’s the point?

The bromide, supposed to help him sleep, sat among the underclothes in its squat brown bottle. Poison, he declared it. Bromide had been used on the troops in Egypt, France, Flanders—to calm them down, was the rumour, to curb behaviour unbecoming His Majesty’s men. Funny, really—not really at all—because the only time Magnus Tulloch ever made love to me was in his sleep, or a haze I took for sleep. A body is all I was, a faceless woman in a dream, but I was afraid to wake him, afraid of what it would do. And truth to say, I was grateful for whatever small intimacy might bring the boy back to me, if only for the space between dream and awake.