Even when there were other men around, as there often were, she still thought of it as just the two of them, because the men were transients, passing through. Their hair, brown, black, grey, in the basin and their shaving kit on the bathroom shelf; their coats slung over the back of the chair and their shoes at the bottom of the stairs; their voices floating from her mother’s bedroom into hers late at night. Murmurs, giggles, shouts, sometimes drawn-out animal sobs that would make her bury her head in her pillow, put her fingers into her ears, count to a hundred. They always left in the end, scraping the chair violently on the tiled floor, slamming the door, hurling a last word up the stairs, and the house would return to its normal quiet. She and her mother would sit at the kitchen table eating boiled eggs or lamb chops to the soft tick of the clock over the door. Irene always had the feeling, during these years, that she was waiting for her real life to begin.

She’d felt guiltily euphoric, leaving her quiet home for college; even more so when after university she went to teach English to children in a village in the south of Angola. She couldn’t believe how unencumbered it was possible to be. She felt strangely weightless, as if her feet were only just touching the ground.

Then when she was twenty-three her mother had been toppled by a stroke and she had come home, as she had always known she would have to do. Her life, which for the past four years had funnelled out until at last she had the dizzy sense of having no horizons, had suddenly been telescoped back into the small tidy house of her childhood. She slept in her old narrow bed, under the red and orange duvet she had chosen when she was twelve, staring at the patterns on the curtains. She sat in the kitchen under the same clock, waiting, while the whole house seemed to hold its breath. She sat by the side of the bed, holding her mother’s limp, cool fingers and talking to her because the doctors had said maybe she could still hear – somewhere behind her closed eyes and her changed face, her brain might still be ticking like the old clock.