After a few minutes she swung her legs cautiously out of the bed and stood up. She padded to the small bathroom, washed her face and cleaned her teeth. Her face was pale and her hair a tangle. Then she found her clothes and put them on noiselessly. She had nothing to pack. Almost everything was in the car.

She hesitated, looking at the sleeping Luke; leant over and kissed his warm, damp forehead.

‘Thanks,’ she whispered, and crept from the room.

Thirty-four

Irene was home by five, and although she’d barely been away a fortnight her memory played strange tricks on her. The house seemed smaller, the ceiling lower than she’d thought. The staircase turned away at a sharper angle. She dropped her luggage inside the kitchen door, stuffed her first load of washing inside the machine, noticed that there was a vase of dead roses standing in green, smelly water. Then she went upstairs slowly, breathing in the musty air, seeing how the small pane of glass at the top of the landing was smeared and how the carpet was grimy and threadbare.

She opened the window in Aggie and Clem’s room, sat on the nearest bed, picking up Aggie’s teddy and holding its prickly, balding body against her cheek. She went into Sasha’s room and unnecessarily straightened the duvet, then drew her finger across the sill, gathering up a smirch of dust. From the window, she saw that the grass on the lawn was long; the yellow roses had bolted and dropped their petals in little heaps on the ground. The misshapen pears on the tree were weighing down its branches and a few had already fallen.

Next, she wandered into the box room, that was to have been Felix’s and that since his death had stood unused, just boxes of hand-me-down Babygros and tiny, stained cardigans that he never got to wear, soft crocheted blankets that had never been unpacked. Irene pulled a handful of clothes from a bin bag and pushed her face into their pastel folds. They smelt of talcum powder. The Moses basket stood in the corner, with a small sheet folded neatly inside and on top of that a white, fluffy seal, the girls’ present to him when he’d been born. They’d all crowded round him and Clem had touched his button nose with her grubby forefinger, looking embarrassed, and Aggie had started to cry because his fragile head was against Irene’s breast and suddenly that was where she wanted to be. Sasha had just stared, as if she was trying to learn his face, his tiny features. Then with a cautious smile she’d put the seal at his feet and said, ‘Hello, Felix.’