‘I was older,’ she says, ‘he went off to fight. It’s different.’

‘But you still wanted to know the truth about the way he left, didn’t you?’

She picks up the dishes.

‘And I had people lining up to give me all the details,’ she says, ‘but the only person I really wanted to hear it from was him.’

She tucks Alex into Karen’s old bed, and leaves the little lamp on so he won’t get scared. She reads a story about a daddy-bear who can’t find anywhere to sleep and I worry that he’ll ask about Ian but he doesn’t. By the end of it I’m yawning. I lean on the door. She’s saying a prayer, getting ready to leave. I lie down next to him on the bed and she laughs and says ‘You’ll be asleep before him, Arthur,’ and I wave her away. We put our heads together. He smells of May’s perfume. I close my eyes and after a while he whispers in my ear: ‘I want Mummy.’ And I don’t hear it at first because I’m already drifting but he says it again. It may be the first thing he’s said to me all evening now I come to think of it and I don’t know what to do.

‘She’s coming in the morning,’ I say, ‘just go to sleep now.’

But his face, which is right next to mine, so close I can feel every breath, crumples up, and he’s crying silently at first and then wailing and saying her name over and over.

‘Shhhh,’ I say, and pat his arm and try to give him a toy to hold, but this is getting beyond me. I have to roll over, so stiff now I’m not sure I can even get off the bed. I roll over with a thud onto the carpet and push myself upright. I collide with May in the doorway.

‘What did you do?’

‘Nothing! He just started crying.’

She shoves me out the door and sighs as if to say she could’ve predicted this would happen, she could’ve predicted she’d be the one cleaning up my bloody mess.

‘Get yourself to bed,’ she says. One last order before she gives him all her attention. And I do. I stagger into the bedroom and fall down on top of the duvet and listen to her singing, You are my sunshine, my only sunshine, you make me happy, when skies are grey. For a minute I think of Ian holding Alex in the living room one Sunday afternoon, throwing him too high in the air and Karen behind him all worried but not wanting to interfere, and his little face all shocked and full of wonder.