After Sandy had gone, Grace’s animation sank to nothing. Lydia called for her in a plaintive voice and patted a place beside her on the sofa, then Grace lay with her head in her mother’s lap. Someone turned on the television news. — I don’t know if I can bear to watch this, Christine said, but she stayed, standing up by the door as if she was on her way out. Alex always watched the news; there was this cold anger ready in him, leaping up to meet whatever new outrage presented itself. They saw footage of events at Calais, where desperate migrants who wanted to enter the UK were trying to board lorries or break into the tunnels under cover of darkness; one man lay spread-eagled on top of a train. Watching this scalded Christine, the horror of that inky starfish shape, dark against the darkness – who was he, what became of him? – mingled in her awareness with her own suffering. Yet she knew it was indecent to make any connection between their private loss and this public shame. Their world was privileged even in its grieving; there wasn’t any moral meaning to Zachary’s death, it wasn’t an injustice. And yet it undid them all.

It seemed airless in their bedroom while Christine undressed; she pushed the Velux skylight open to its furthest extent and the hot night rolled in from outside, tainted and gritty. She was tensely aware of the others sleeping or not sleeping below her in the crowded flat: Lydia in the spare room, Max on the sofa. The girls had gone back to Isobel’s in a cab. Alex had wanted to put Max on the pull-out bed in Christine’s studio, he’d been surprised to find the door locked. She’d shaken her head at him when he asked if she knew where the key was. — Just put him on the sofa in the front.

She and Alex lay side by side in bed in the dark like effigies, on their backs in their nightclothes, with their legs stretched out and their feet sticking up, staring up at nothing, not touching – yet she felt the heat of his skin, scorching hers. Sleep seemed very remote. — Was it strange to be in their home? she asked. — When you went round for Lydia’s clothes. Zachary’s things must have been lying round everywhere.

Lydia and Zachary lived in converted parish rooms attached to the chapel which was now an art gallery. Christine had envied them the austere high ceilings and high arched windows of imperfect greenish glass, the old tiles and brass tap in the kitchen, the stylish ultra-modern conversion. She and Alex couldn’t have afforded to live anywhere so distinguished.