At half-term and end of term, she collected the boys from school and brought them home, driving and asking them questions as she drove, glancing across or back at them in the passenger seats, impatient to close the gap that had opened when they had been away. Each time, they looked the same and yet not the same. Each time, they knew more things that she didn’t know, Test Match scores, names of cars on the road, boys’ knowledge that set them apart. Never before had they had lives apart from hers. Billy would be there to help lift their trunks from the car and upstairs. Billy would greet them as if they’d never been away, Jess jump up and lick their faces and skitter after them about the rooms.

The noise was so sudden, even if long anticipated, breaking the accumulated silence of weeks. Was this how it had been, she thought, before? Last time? The boys or the sound of them seemed to fill every room at once.

Then there was the smell of them, the smell on the clothes that she unpacked the next day from the trunks and took in a great heap to carry down to wash. The dirt, the mess, the dried mud on their rugger boots that fell off in the pattern of their studs onto the bedroom carpet. So much she had forgotten, each time. She should have thought to have Billy leave the trunks downstairs so that she might have put all the dirty things into the scullery straightaway.

The summer holiday was the greatest liberation of all. The boys ran wildly through the house. With windmilling arms they mimed bowling, through the rooms and up the stairs. As she came onto the landing with their sports clothes in her arms she almost collided with Richard. She dropped all the clothes, shorts, shirts falling, as a hard red ball passed fast and close to her head and smashed the window behind her.

I didn’t mean to let go, Richard said. I was only practising my action. He cupped his hand again as if it held the ball. See, this is how I learnt to do it. Slowly, with deliberation, he raised his arm, wheeled it back and up, released his fingers, with a little twist of the wrist for spin. Like that, he said, his blue eyes direct and without apology.

But that ball was real, she said. It was a hard cricket ball. It might have hurt me.

He too, she saw, was real, substantial as the ball, separate from her idea of him. He had grown while he was away, at once taller and less sturdy. She thought of him always as such a sturdy boy. It would not be long before he was as tall as she was, but he was bold as if he had that height already, looking at her boldly eye to eye.

If you have a ball, she said, then you must do your bowling outside.