Sipping his tea, he crossed the living room and went the length of a short corridor of scuffed and torn lino into the ‘playroom’. In the twenty years since he and Larry had used it as a den the room had become a kind of depositary, a ramshackle museum of family history, the boards piled high with junk. He had visited the room on the previous two nights at about the same hour, each time on the pretext of starting to determine what from among this tidal wash of oddments might be kept, though the truth – which standing in the doorway he now admitted to himself – was that the room still retained for him something of its air of refuge. It soothed him, and among those stations of the night that were becoming increasingly apparent to him, it was an interlude of calm, a place where he could breathe the gentle anaesthetic of nostalgia.

Some of the objects in the room had reached their last declension, existing only in a stubborn limbo of silence and inutility. Others were immediately eloquent. A beige and purple oil heater of curious design, sitting where it had been placed perhaps fifteen years before, instantly revived a scene of winter evenings after school, a scent of oil mingling with the smell of sausages or fish-fingers, and the wafting all-pervasive smoke of Alice’s cigarettes. And from the box he had emptied the previous evening he had pulled out, as though lifting something precious and extraordinary from the pharaoh’s tomb, a single tan boxing glove, lone memento of his slogging matches with Larry, fights which, however temperately begun, often ended with a flurry of wild punches, and Alec on the floor bawling with frustration, while Larry stood over him, anger already cooling to remorse as he glanced nervously at the door.

Tonight’s box, which he dragged under the light of the ceiling bulb, was a large supermarket fruit carton with SPAR in green letters along the side. Here, with a rush of whatever chemical such recognitions released into the blood, he discovered the pieces of an elaborate toy that must have been given when he was about seven, and Larry nine or ten: a lunar landscape made of moulded plastic, and a little spidery landing craft of great simplicity and delicacy that had once had a balloon attached to it, and which was directed on to the sheet of moon by small battery-powered fans. It belonged to a period that now seemed bizarrely remote, when space travel was front-page news and children kept scrapbooks with pictures of astronauts. No self-respecting child would waste time on such a toy now. For a start, there was no screen.