‘She’s seven years old. What does she want with a painting?’

‘Fair play,’ said Asquith, examining his hands. ‘Perhaps I’m a bad father.’

‘Don’t feel sorry for yourself,’ said Heidi.

‘Daddy, I had a dream about you last night,’ said Emily. ‘We went to a shop and ate chips. We bought toys.’

‘I have a great deal of regret,’ Asquith told Heidi. ‘You have no idea.’

Heidi said: ‘What do you mean?’

‘I’m a bad person.’

‘Go on.’

‘I mean to say,’ said Asquith. ‘No, rather, let’s forget what I said. I’m being melodramatic. You know what it’s like when I don’t sleep. I’m terribly keyed up. Pour me a cup of tea and then we might all go for a walk. How does that sound?’

‘I’m going to get Rick,’ said Heidi, who wasn’t appeased. ‘I’ll be back in a minute, Em, all right?’

While Emily heard everything her parents had said, the discourse of grown-ups was a landscape in which she often couldn’t get her bearings. Her father was a bad person? But he didn’t seem like a baddie. Or he felt sad in his heart? It was probably a grown-up’s idea of a joke.

As soon as Heidi left the room, Asquith asked his daughter: ‘Would you like your present? We can fetch it.’

‘Yes please,’ she said.

He rose from the couch and together they went out into the backyard, and from there into the lane behind the house and down to the street. When it started to rain he opened an umbrella and they took shelter underneath it; they did not stop walking until they were sitting on a train to London. Their seats were covered in a red candy-stripe moquette, the lines slightly curved from wear. The air whistle screaked long and loud and the train bobbed away into the west. ‘Perhaps you’d like to look out the window,’ suggested Asquith. He closed his eyes, and Emily stared at the solemn green countryside and majestic churches sunk deep in the panorama. Her father remained quiet; he barely spoke; he sat with his arms folded. In this way they went on. They went all the way to London, to the indifferent Londoners, who walked past little Emily without seeing her, or so she imagined. And she thought, so this was where he came from, this place could tell me something about him, my real dad, if only I stayed here long enough. She might well have been invisible to everybody except Ian Asquith, who did not hold her hand but who had brought her here, wanted her with him, who guided her along the streets to his home near Acton Town station. For a long time he’d worked in the administrative offices of the Borough of Ealing and lived in this same ground-floor flat.