The silence extended itself. The need to cry burned behind my eyes, the pressure of years of denied weeping swelling inside my skull, but I didn’t cry and my inability to do so only increased my sense of impotence. Unwitting Jack, my unlucky child, was the focus of this mighty powerlessness. I couldn’t make the world right for him, I couldn’t even make the dealings between us right. Sympathy for him was squeezing my heart so I could barely speak.

‘I’m sorry,’ I managed to say.

He pushed back his chair and stood up. ‘Going to school,’ was his only response.

I went with him to the door and watched him until he was out of sight. I longed to run after him, to go with him and shield him through the day, to turn his everything into nothing that mattered and let us both start again, but I couldn’t. It was hard to accept that after all the promises I had made to myself when they were small, about always being close to my children and never letting them down, there was still a breach between Jack and me. Ted was dead and gone but somehow his damned legacy was right here in our house with us.

I was angry as well as impotent. I slammed my hand down on the kitchen table, so hard that the pain jarred through my wrist bones, but nothing changed and my head still hurt with not crying.

I snatched up my bag and went to work. It was too late now to walk, even along the canal. I had to drive, in a 9 a.m. press of buses and oversized trucks, and when I arrived I made a mess of cutting some endpapers out of some special old hand-marbled paper that Penny and I had been saving. I had to throw the ruins away and use a poor substitute. Penny kept her head down over her work and although I could sense Andy and Leo glancing at each other, I didn’t look their way.

When I got home again Lola had already gone out to her bar job. In two days’ time she would be going back to university and she was trying to earn as much money as she could. Jack was sitting in front of the television, still wearing his outdoor jacket and his school tie. He looked grubby and utterly exhausted.

‘How was your day?’ I asked. I was going to make shepherd’s pie for supper, his favourite.

‘All right.’

‘What lessons did you have?’

‘The usual ones.’

He didn’t take his eyes off the screen but I didn’t think he was really watching it. There was wariness in the hunch of his shoulders and his fingers curled tightly over the arms of his chair.

‘What did you do in the lunch break?’

‘Nothing.’