‘Your grandma thought you should have your dad’s old room,’ says Jack, following Evan up the creaking stairs. ‘There’s a better view from there. Your dad’s seen it often enough, so she’s put him in the guest room.’ Upstairs the house shows its considerable age, low ceilings and bowed walls, black beams and latched doors. ‘You’re handy for the bathroom there, too. There’s plenty of hot water if you want a shower, but that’s it for the mod cons, I’m afraid. No telly up here. You know me and your grandma. We like to live in the Stone Age.’

Evan pushes open the door at the end of the landing. It’s a small room with a window looking out across the home field and the grazing sheep. In an apple tree whose branches almost touch the windowpanes, a blackbird is singing evensong, melodious and clear.

A single bed made with line-dried linen is pushed against the wall, a hand-knitted patchwork blanket in the crazily bright colours Dora loves folded at its foot. On the bedside table there’s a lamp and a stack of books: a tattered Beano annual, a collection of Spike Milligan’s poems, Barry Hines’s A Kestrel for a Knave, an outdated encyclopaedia of amazing facts, a new magazine of word-search puzzles with a pen. On the dressing table are three white roses in a vase.

Jack points to the roses.

‘I told your grandma young men don’t appreciate flowers, but she goes her own way, as you well know. Unpack your things if you like, make yourself at home. The top drawer of that chest is empty. The rest of it’s full of your dad’s stuff which I reckon should have gone in the bin years ago, but that’s your grandma again. So. I’ll leave you to it. Sweet dreams, son.’

In the distant past, he would have kissed Evan goodnight. Under normal circumstances, Evan would be beyond that now, well into those early teenage years of self-conscious separation. But Evan looks small, slightly bewildered and alone, and the urge to put an arm round him is strong.

Jack resists. As he reaches the top of the stairs, he hears the knock of wood on wood as Evan props a chair against the door, barricading himself in and sealing out the world.

Dora has gone to bed. Jack goes to the sideboard and takes a bottle of Glenfiddich and two of the best lead crystal glasses from the cupboard.

He holds up the bottle to Matt, who nods his head.

‘What’s this?’ he says. ‘Christmas come early?’

‘I’ve fallen out with Christmas.’ Jack pours a generous measure into each glass. ‘It never came last year, and it looks like it might not this year either. Cheers.’

They clink glasses, and Jack sinks into an armchair.

‘What do you think to Evan?’ asks Matt, and Jack shakes his head.