When Alec missed the turn-off, Alice waved a crumpled tissue at him and called him a fool, as if they drove this way every week. He apologized, reversed, and turned into a lane that ran between unmown verges, the ruts and potholes blue with last week’s rain.

‘Wow,’ said Kirsty, ‘real countryside.’

‘We may see some bears,’ said Larry. ‘Better wind up your window, Mum.’

But she wasn’t listening to them any more. She wasn’t interested in their chatter. This was private.

Larry leaned forward and touched his brother’s shoulder. ‘You remember this?’

Alec nodded. There were fields here they had once played in together, greening their knees. And certain small farms they had worked on during the holidays or at weekends, baling or scrumping, earning a few pounds, then drinking milk in the farmhouse kitchen when it was too dark to work. It stirred them, seeing it again, the lane twisting into the hills like time itself, and for the last fifteen minutes the journey was processional and solemn and they rode in silence.

The house stood alone on a stretch of road at the outskirts of the village: two storeys of red brick with the year ‘1907’ pricked out in black paint on a stone above the front door. From the outside at least, the place did not look very different, though there were new high gates, and a yellow alarm box prominent beside an upstairs window, and in the centre of the driveway a little fountain – cherub and urn – as in a country hotel. Alec parked the car between a Range Rover and a green MG, and as the brothers gently levered Alice from her seat, an old Labrador limped over the gravel to meet them, snuffling at the hem of Alice’s coat, as if the mink, dead half a century ago, still leaked some subtle feral stink.

‘Shoo,’ sighed Alice, but the dog was full of doggish interest in her, and followed them to the front door. Larry tugged at the craftwork iron bell-pull (a plain electric buzzer in Grandma Wilcox’s day), and after a minute the jangling was answered by a young man, twenty, twenty-two, who stood in the door frame, pale and pretty, his shirt unbuttoned to his navel, looking at them as if good style meant a level of unresponsiveness that bordered on the moronic. Evidently, no one had told him who this gaunt and weirdly dressed woman might be. He leaned against the door and drawled, ‘I’m Tom.’

‘Yes,’ said Alice, and letting go of her sons she staggered past him into the dark of the hall.

‘We’ve come to visit,’ said Alec, hurrying after her, afraid that she would crash disastrously on to the tiles.

‘Name of Valentine,’ added Larry, grinning at the boy’s discomfort and following the others inside.

‘We’re Valentines too!’ said Kirsty. ‘Do you have a bathroom for my little girl?’