Irene looked from Sasha, opposite her, to Adrian who was standing at the end of the table behind Clem, his hands loosely on his daughter’s shoulders. And as she looked his face softened and became grave and tender. He smiled, beautiful in the guttering light. He wasn’t smiling at her, but for a few moments she had the bewildering sensation that when she turned her head in the direction of his glance, it would be herself she would see, returning his look that was naked and intimate, like a promise.

But she just saw Karen, Mac, Frankie, other smiling mothers, a melee of muddy-cheeked children, all shouting out the song, and a space where her own face should have been. She blinked and glanced back at Adrian, but he was singing loudly and grinning towards Ben and his green cake-pitch where six candles dripped wax. The spell was broken, the candles were blown out, the lights turned back on, the cake cut into squares and handed round on pieces of paper towel. She had forgotten all about it. Or half-forgotten. It remained like a distant rumour in her mind, a chilly gust of wind that blows up before the storm.

They were well back in the term-time routine by then. They would get up while it was still half-dark, and even when it grew light it was grey and dull. Colours leaked away; pencil and charcoal on soggy paper. Houses seemed to lean in over the streets, the skies lowered and the horizon was rubbed out by fog. People didn’t lift their eyes; they wrapped themselves in thick coats, pulled hats over their brows, snapped open umbrellas. But Irene, when she walked into the garden, where rain churned up the grass and bushes dripped, could see snowdrops coming up, winter aconites, the shoots of daffodils. She examined the magnolia tree and saw the first stubby buds that would soon become a waxy candelabra.