That was it – one small case, with room to spare. Tomorrow, she could just pick it up and walk out of the house, closing the front door behind her. This wasn’t like the holiday packing she’d become used to with her daughters, when she would fill bags with endless changes of clothes for cold and warm weather, wet and dry, and then still have to remember the bikes that they’d hang off the rack at the back of the car, the nappies and baby wipes, buggies and carrycots and bottles and feeder cups, the wellington boots that looked like frogs, the chapter books and picture books and books to read aloud, the drawing paper and crayons and gel pens, the games (Clem’s Lego, Sasha’s collection of minute dolls with their own beautifully stitched clothes, as well as snakes and ladders, Monopoly, Boggle, Uno), the football, the armbands and rubber rings, the backpacks for the journey, the treats for the car to keep them quiet, the Calpol and sticking plasters, the potty, the travel sickness pills for Clem and Aggie’s bear that mustn’t go in the boot … Like travelling with an army into unknown territory, where they might not have Coco-pops and raspberry jam.

Irene realized she was excited, full of a buzzing anticipatory energy that she hadn’t felt in years. Her husband had left her, her daughters were with him on the other side of the world, and tomorrow she was going to step into her old car with the rusting sills and the passenger door that wouldn’t open unless you yanked it hard, turn the key in the ignition, and set off across France to see her little brother get married. She would do it on her own, driving onto the train with men in orange fluorescent jackets shouting instructions at her, consulting the map and finding her route through foreign places, sliding her music into the tape deck and turning the volume up loud, passing euros to the men at the toll booths, filling up with petrol, stopping for the night in some hotel in a town she’d never heard of, eating alone in a restaurant and nobody facing her across the table, just the view out of the window and later a single bed with a stiff bolster.

Nobody would know who she was. There would be nobody to talk to, share thoughts and plans and laughter with. She would just hold them all inside herself and they would belong to her alone. She had not done anything like this since she had met Adrian and coupled her life to his.