Lorna was thinking about Lydia Healy. The woman had taken ill in the supermarket. Heart attack. Word was she had died in the ­frozen-­food aisle, right next to a bin of ­cut-­price Christmas hams the supermarket was selling off before they went out of date. That’s what people were saying, anyway. In her mind Lorna was able to picture the scene with an omniscient minuteness of ­detail – Lydia Healy down on her back on the filthy, sticky supermarket linoleum, trolley askew in the aisle, the teenage staff in their ­short-­sleeve polyester work shirts gathering around her, stricken and incredulous as Lydia gasped for breath. The indignity of it.

Lorna believed she had seen a man die once, at a beach resort, as a teenager. Lorna, her mother and her father, Tom, were on holiday in Nice with Auntie Moira and Lorna’s cousins. A man had taken gravely ill on the beach, a few yards from them. Lorna could not say for sure that he was gone by the time the paramedics strapped him to a gurney and carried him up the beach, but she was convinced she had seen him pass the threshold beyond which there was no coming back. She remembers children screaming ecstatically and inflatables bobbing in the surf like bright trash, and further out the clenched shoulders of adults as they waded beyond the bearably ­waist-­high waves. Lorna had been Luke’s age, thirteen, fourteen, and the man had seemed very old, though he was probably only in his early fifties. He was with a woman, presum­ably his wife. The wife was sitting on a towel with her knees drawn up to her bust and they were arguing in the injurious, teacherly cadences of the ­well-­off British. The woman wanted to leave. The man said something about going back in the water. You do what you want to do, Margaret, Lorna remembers the man saying, and she could still hear him now, more than twenty years on, the low, patient note of deeply grooved spite in his voice. You always get to do exactly what you want to do. He was standing over the woman, and after a little while, he abruptly stopped his jeering and sat down on the towel next to hers, as if the argument was over. Then, in Lorna’s memory, the man looked straight at ­her – at teenage Lorna. His mouth was ajar, and he wore a puzzled, mildly stunned expression, like a man on a train platform who at the very last moment delays for some unaccountable fraction and must watch the carriage doors seal shut right in front of his nose. He wasn’t going anywhere; it was all at once going away from him.

‘Do you remember in Nice,’ Lorna began, ‘Mam? Remember the beach in Nice when that man died right in front of everyone.’

‘What?’ Anne said.