On she went beside him: the drunkenness, the chaos, the role Peter played as her ally and support, until his own shame drove him to attempt suicide. She told him about the scene at Brown Bayley’s, the photographs displayed there by Martin Baxter, how she’d torn them down, then gone home and had to cut Peter down from the light flex, and then had fled to his, Daniel’s, house, forgetting he’d be long gone to Manchester. Dan groaned, thinking of the hard time he’d given her only yesterday for missing the gig. But she wasn’t finished; she continued on in the same low, expressionless voice, as if she was reading a written account of someone else’s terrible history. Peter revealing the escape fund, urging her to get the hell out of Sheffield and be free. Her refusal; her confidence in her own ability to tough things out. And then Martin Baxter, fulfilling the menace and violence he’d always threatened, overpowering her, raping her, treating her with bottomless contempt, showing her just how weak and worthless she really was. Dan moaned with a kind of visceral pain, a futile agony that she’d borne this abominable assault and its consequences entirely alone, undefended, unprotected. Lovely, clever, talented, incomparable Alison Connor, thought Dan: his shining light.

‘There were two versions of me,’ she said. ‘Two Alisons, leading two separate lives. Peter and I, we cobbled together a kind of normality for each other, but it turned out to be built on sand. I was ashamed, always, of where I came from, who I came from. Catherine was a liability, an embarrassment, she was no mother, to me or to Peter. It was our job to try and look after her, and we had a father who upped and left us to our fate, probably started again with somebody more functioning, probably never gave me or Peter a thought—’ She stopped speaking suddenly, although it’d seemed she was about to go on; then, ‘That’s it,’ she said. ‘No more to tell.’

She allowed herself to drop sideways, away from him, until she was lying down, curled on her side like a sleeping child, although her eyes were open, wide and anxious, as if she’d forgotten how to shut them. He placed himself down in the narrow space alongside her and stroked her cheek. She hadn’t shed a tear; her face was stone.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘It’s OK.’ He drew her eyes closed with his fingers and kissed her eyelids softly, and she kept them shut, then reached out and pulled him closer still, so that she could fall asleep, and he stayed with her there and watched her for all the time it took for her to stir and stretch and open her eyes, and then they made love again, but it was very quiet this time, and slow, and healing.