He looked from one of us to the other, holding each of our gazes. Then he winked at my mum and said, ‘Sorry for the bad language, Mrs E.’

I gave him a wan smile, wishing I had received a small injury, nothing serious of course, but enough to snap Matty out of professional mode and to make myself the centre of his attention. Then I berated myself for feeling envious of a man who, for all we knew, had a broken neck.

Matty leaned towards me, put both of his hands very gently on my shoulders and kissed the top of my head. ‘You really okay, you sure?’ he whispered.

I nodded again.

Mum said, ‘Oh Matthew, what would we have done without you?’

We were less than two hundred metres from my parents’ house but Mum and I walked slowly down the Close. I had hold of her arm, or perhaps she had hold of mine. A neighbour came out from number forty-four and said, ‘Bridget, are you alright?’

Mum said, a little stiffly, ‘Yes, I’m fine, thank you, my daughter’s here.’

Inside the house, I sat Mum down on the sofa and went to the kitchen and became aware that my legs were shaking fiercely, the muscles shuddering against the bone as I moved around the small square kitchen. I filled and turned on the kettle that always leaked. I hoped I wasn’t going to pass out, not when I was in charge of looking after Mum. I switched on the oven for her, to start warming it up. I knew she would start fussing about lunch as soon as she had had her tea.

Matty must have tracked Dad down by phone at the Bowls Club as twenty minutes later, while we were both still drinking tea, there was the sound of his key in the door. He stood in the doorway of the sitting room looking at us and said, ‘So, I heard.’

Mum burst into tears.

*

When we got home early that evening, I found a bruise on my left-hand temple, a small but dense one, with a slight swelling beneath, that looked as though it might spread down my face. I went up to Matthew and stood in front of him, pushing my hair back from my face to show him, wincing – a little melodramatically – as he examined it. He gave a pale smile and said, ‘You’ll live.’