‘Stick a needle in my eye?’

‘Stick a needle in my eye.’

Over the next few days, the tree grew more clotted and baroque. Sasha made paper chains and stencilled shapes, sprayed gold and silver, to hang on its branches. Clem and Aggie ate the chocolate reindeers and left the silver foil dangling raggedly. The ancient, disintegrated fairy that Irene thought she remembered her father fixing to the top of the tree when she was tiny, tipped so it looked as if it was caught in the act of falling. It was very different from the tasteful silver affair in Karen’s house. Mysterious parcels arrived in the post from France, some squashy and some hard; Clem’s tape of Christmas carols played over and over in children’s sugary, hopeful voices; and there was the smell of baking in the kitchen – a cake lumpy with glacé cherries, ginger, sultanas and chopped nuts that they all had to stir together to make a wish; chestnuts that Irene boiled and peeled, the skin catching under her nails; cloves stuck in a ham; vanilla pods in simmering milk; coffee, spluttering over the edge of the old espresso pot in the middle of the day. Two days before Christmas Adrian made a warm punch because people were coming for drinks: cinnamon and allspice catching in the nostril. The children watched through the banisters, giggling.

Who had come for the drinks? Irene remembered Karen and Mac, Gary though not Sarah, a couple of out-of-work actors who swapped swashbuckling tales of failure and disaster, Polly and Leah and Kim and Max. Not Frankie. She remembered Gary telling her at great length about the colour of Connor’s shit – mustard yellow – and she remembered that Polly had dyed her hair red. And she remembered Adrian walking into the garden at one point with his mobile. Or had she just made that up – the sight of him standing on the other side of the glass, under the new moon and the cold white stars, speaking urgently into his phone while inside people got drunk on mulled wine and upstairs the children jumped from bed to bed until Aggie stubbed her toe on the corner of the chest of drawers and came downstairs shrieking like a car alarm that no one could turn off?

‘Frankie? Frankie? Can you hear me? If you can hear me, pick up the phone. Please. Pick up. Listen. I need to speak to you. I just need – I can’t bear … Please call.’

He looked up at the lights shining out of his house. In the upstairs window, he caught sight of Sasha, brushing her hair. And through the kitchen window, he could see Irene, ladling punch into glasses, smiling at someone and nodding her head. This was his life, he thought, and he closed his eyes for a moment, then lifted up his phone again, pressed redial.

‘Frankie? Frankie? Are you there?’