The other thing that had got to him – and this had been needling him pretty much all the time – was that if he had meant to send her one last song, it wouldn’t have been ‘Sunshine Superman’, with its jaunty, confident, upbeat refrain. It would’ve been something dark and brooding, something wounded, something writhing in pain. And he’d sat there in the Sunday-morning calm of the newly neutral living room, thought for a while about this theme, then sent her another song, a definitively final track that best reflected his state of mind: ‘I Want You’, Elvis Costello’s seething anthem to that fine line between love and hate, a dark hymn for the heartbroken, a study in obsessive longing. There was a jagged seam of pure truth in it, and if these songs they’d shared meant anything at all, they had to be honest.

He’d felt better after he watched it go. He hoped it’d send a shiver of regret down her lovely, supple spine. He hoped, too, she’d understand the synchronicity, the Costello full-circle thing, which had started with nostalgia and ended with a demonic ballad about what happens to your head and heart when your favourite girl goes off with another bloke. That’s that then, he’d thought. Then he’d gone down the hall to the kitchen, to make batter for the Yorkshire puddings.

Rose-Ann chimed a knife against her glass and said, ‘A toast,’ and Dan’s heart sank a fraction. She raised her Rioja. ‘To survivors in choppy waters,’ she said, classic Rose-Ann, speaking out loud what she believed everyone thought but no one other than her was brave enough to say.

‘Och, Rose-Ann, bugger that,’ Duncan said, bold man, probably the pale ale talking. ‘To happy days,’ he said, and his wife was immediately overruled by the others. ‘Happy days,’ they said, and clinked glasses, then the conversation round the table fell into its familiar, comfortable groove, roving between those well-trodden subjects that old friends like to revisit, not because there’s anything new to add, but only to affirm and reaffirm what they already know. Music was supposed to be out of bounds when they were a foursome – it was tedious (Katelin) and excluding (Rose-Ann) – but you might as well tell the parish priest to quit mentioning God. It was Dan and Duncan’s world, it was why they were mates, it was what got them out of bed in the mornings. Plus, Duncan had news. Jeanie and the Kat had four of their original tracks on Spotify, and now they were going gangbusters in Norway and Sweden, like, seriously big. And yesterday he’d heard their music playing in a café in Cockburn Street.