Mel banged on the table. ‘Now it’s my turn,’ she called out. She looked tired, with dark patches under her eyes, and she didn’t try to stand up. The evening was beginning to tell on her. ‘I have another toast. To family and friends,’ she said.

‘To family. And friends.’ We drank to that.

The talk broke up while we ate our chocolate pudding. Mel managed only a couple of mouthfuls of her helping before her spoon drooped, and Caz took her plate away before anyone noticed. Lola poked her head round Sam’s shoulder and called to me, ‘How amazing is this, Mum? Clare knows Chloe and Seb.’

‘That is amazing,’ I agreed. In fact, it wasn’t surprising at all. Wherever she went Lola seemed to encounter someone she knew or who knew someone else she knew. She moved blithely and unquestioningly through a huge, loose web of friends and friends of friends from school, and boys she had been to discos with when she was thirteen, and their brothers and their networks of mates and girlfriends, who connected in their turn and intersected one another’s social groups in an endlessly complicated Venn diagram. I often thought that to Lola and her friends the city must seem like a vast disorganised club that was constantly yielding new connections to further consolidate their membership.

This notion was pleasing. It went against the current of threat that had swollen through the long hot summer and had finally broken out in random violence and a knife blade.

The four youths who had robbed the off-licence were arrested the day after the stabbing. Their hoodie tops were pulled down over their faces so that the cameras couldn’t distinguish their identities, but one of the eyewitnesses had recognised them anyway. One of them had indeed been an apprentice butcher.

There had been a couple of days of newspaper headlines, after the arrest and while Mel’s life was still in danger, but then events in the Middle East had commanded the news again and the story had faded. It was as if the waters had closed over the rocks, temporarily at least until the trial, and the waves subsided into ripples that were only felt by those of us who loved Mel.

Now the cool windy weather stripped drought-browned leaves from the trees and piled them in autumnal heaps in gutters and doorways. Relief at the return of normality fluttered under the prematurely bare branches.

Sam and Lola and Caz’s Dan took Clare off upstairs to Lola’s room.

Caz and I were piling up plates and making coffee when Jack left the table and sidled up behind me. He stood close, frowning and fidgeting, and then said, ‘Mum, you know, you should have asked Audrey to come tonight.’

I straightened up from loading the dishwasher. ‘Should I? She doesn’t know Mel.’

Jack shrugged. ‘Well. You know.’