She looked at the little boy outside again, and thought of the wretchedness of missing what you’ve never had. Haunted by absence. Empty body, empty room, no small fist fastening round your finger, no one calling out for you in the night. Mummy, mummy, mummy: the only person in the whole wide world who would do.

Adrian didn’t get home till late. Irene took the girls swimming after school, made them spaghetti with tomato sauce for supper, let them watch the video of Monsters Inc. because tomorrow was the last day of school. Then she put Clem and Aggie into a bath together and washed their hair, although Aggie screamed about the soap in her eyes and the knots in her hair and how the water from the hose-shower was too cold, too hot, ow, ow, ow! After she had read to them, she left them and sat for a while in Sasha’s room, tidying away clothes and sorting toys while her eldest daughter traced pictures of birds from a book. Irene looked at her pale, blunt face; her brown hair, brushed so it shone and tucked behind her ears; her small pursed lips. Her thin, bare legs were tucked underneath her. She kept everything inside herself, thought Irene. Clem and Aggie were always shouting, screaming, hooting, rushing, falling, laughing, weeping; they had no control over the feelings that coursed through them and spilled out of them. But Sasha’s surface was smooth and demure, with no cracks through which her interior life showed. Sometimes Irene would ask her what she was feeling and she’d frown, thinking seriously about the question, and then shrug. ‘Things,’ she’d say; or ‘I don’t know really. Nothing.’ She was an underground stream, noiseless, mysterious and cool.

Downstairs, Irene boiled some green lentils, and the steam filled the kitchen with a smell like wet dog. She made a salad, put four sausages in a medium oven. At half past eight she rang his mobile but it was switched off. At nine, she turned off the oven, leaving the sausages inside to keep warm.

She went upstairs and kissed each child goodnight once more. Sasha was lying on her back, staring at the cracked ceiling and listening to a talking tape. She murmured that she had cold feet, so Irene made her a hot-water bottle and slid it under the duvet, onto her icy toes. Aggie was asleep, clutching three Beanie Babies to her, so Irene brushed her plump cheek gently. But she put her arms around Clem and hugged her, kissing her damp forehead and her dry lips and smelling her clean hair and her soapy, sweaty skin. She left the door half-open, so light from the hall fell across their two beds, and stood for a moment, listening to the sound of Aggie’s heavy breathing, the small voice from Sasha’s tape.