‘Get on that train and don’t look back,’ he said. ‘Seize the next few weeks, and really make them count,’ and he meant it, he truly wanted only the best experience for her, he wanted this trip to be a high point in her life, but he also knew he was hiding his own profound unease, because he wasn’t immune to the crashing irony of being asked to keep Duncan on the straight and narrow.

God knows, he was not the man for that job. In the weeks and then days in the run-up to Katelin’s departure, he’d begun to feel perpetually disorientated, as feelings and events of another lifetime gained ground on him, while Katelin – blameless, entirely blameless – continued blithely on in their present. He longed, now, for her to leave. Yesterday the house had been mayhem, a vortex of paraphernalia and low-level panic, all the various stages of her packing, the details and documents relating to her imminent departure, the choosing of suitcase and cabin bag, the piles of clothes for sunshine, for cooler nights, for rain. He’d done his best, tried to help, dug out some adaptors for US sockets, then Alison had sent him an Arctic Monkeys track, ‘Do I Wanna Know?’, and off he went, spinning down the time tunnel, back to Nether Edge 1979 – although, actually, his first thought had been damn, because he obviously should have sent that song to her – he could hear his own thoughts coming back at him through Alex Turner’s lyrics, and in a Sheffield accent, too. After that he’d had to drag himself back to Stockbridge and the matter in hand, and Katelin had given him that look, the one that told him she knew he was somehow absent, until he’d shaken himself out of the past and given her 100 per cent of his attention, on this big day, the day before she left.