Somehow, Christopher didn’t seem mollified. “I don’t care if it was planned, it was fucking selfish. You get up and do this big ‘Ooh, isn’t it weird how there’s this social convention that we don’t shit-talk people at funerals’ speech like you’re an observational comic from 2006.” He wasn’t exactly shouting. The Blackwoods hadn’t been a shouty family, or rather they’d been a family in which shouting was a monopoly tightly controlled by a man who was now dead. “And then I have to come up and read fucking Kipling like a complete knobhead so we can all get on with pretending that the stupid, selfish thing you just did never happened.”

It was pretty much the exact opposite of what Oliver’s self-esteem needed right then. He hung his head. “And I’m sorry. I really am.”

“It was one speech, Ollie. One tiny little speech to give us all a quiet life, and now I’ve got to go and stop Mum having a total fucking breakdown.”

And somewhere, the part of Oliver that had finally been ready to confront his father got off the bench. Literally, in a way, because he stood up, straightened his suit, and said: “I understand that you’re upset—”

“Don’t give me that—”

“No, Christopher.” Oliver was icy calm now in a way I had learned to be either afraid of or turned on by depending on context. This was fifty-fifty. “I’m afraid I’m giving you exactly that. Because it wasn’t one speech, was it? It was a speech and organising the entire funeral. And staying with Mother for a full week after Father died—much of which, I may add, I spent trying and failing to contact you to tell you our father had died because she couldn’t. And it was Christmas and the Christmas before and the one before that. It was Mum’s sixtieth birthday and Dad’s sixtieth and Great-Uncle Benjy’s funeral. And everything else that you just couldn’t quite make because the first chance you got, you ran away to the other side of the world.”

Christopher folded his arms, but—although I admit I was biased—it was the kind of defiance you got from somebody who knows the other person has a point. “Ah, yes, your brilliant theory that I spent five years at medical school, went through junior doctor training, and now work for one of the most prestigious international aid organisations in the world just to stick you with our parents.”

“I’m not doubting your commitment to what you do”—Oliver’s calm was holding up, but barely—“but can you please just once admit that the consequence of your rather international lifestyle is that I’ve borne the brunt of—”