Even when she saw him that first time – red-faced, baggy-skinned, gummy and bawling – and he had grabbed her finger in his fist and hung on for dear life, her hostility had continued. She didn’t want to know him. She didn’t want to love him. She preferred to see her father, on the rare occasions that he turned up, all by himself, away from the unfamiliar house that reeked of nappies and talcum powder and was full of photographs of people she didn’t know. She didn’t want to be anywhere near her new brother who only had to make an indeterminate sound or hold his foot in his hand and stuff his toes into his mouth to reduce everyone to sentimental adoration. Nor did she want to spend time with her new stepmother who had streaked hair piled high on her head and a dirty laugh and a smell of hyacinths on her clothes.

Then – as quickly as he’d left them – her father had abandoned his second marriage too, taking just one suitcase, leaving behind shirts with fraying collars, bottles of multivitamin tablets, numerous debts and a letter that said he knew he was behaving badly and causing suffering but he had to follow his heart and he prayed for forgiveness. He followed his heart to Wimbledon, then to Dorset, and finally to America, where he still lived.

And Irene had stopped seeing Jem at all, and almost forgotten that he existed. He was a figure from her shadowy early years, a colicky baby with ginger hair, sobbing in a house Irene could barely remember, except that there were nettles and foxgloves in the tiny backyard, and a dark pantry full of tins of condensed milk and bottles of home-made wine. She barely thought of herself as someone who had a brother. After her crowded beginning, she became the only child of a valiant single mother. Just the two of them against the world, walking hand in hand down the streets to school, playing Scrabble and patience after supper, going on bed-and-breakfast holidays in Cornwall for a week every summer.