‘Who’ll look after you?’ asked Sasha. ‘Who’ll wake you up in the mornings?’

Irene looked steadily at Adrian.

‘I can look after myself, you know,’ he said in a voice that was meant to sound jolly but came out loud and panicky.

‘I want something to eat now,’ said Clem. ‘My tummy’s rumbling. Can you hear it?’ She lifted up her tee-shirt and prodded her stomach.

‘All right,’ said Irene, standing up. ‘I’ll get you all supper while you say goodbye to Daddy. He’s coming tomorrow after school so you’ll see him then. Give him a big hug.’

‘No,’ said Sasha. ‘Not now. He’s not going yet?’

‘Give him a big hug, darling. It’s not for long.’

‘Daddy? Daddy?’

‘Give me a hug,’ said Adrian. Tears were pouring down his cheeks, into his mouth.

‘Don’t go yet. It’s not time; later. Please, Daddy. We haven’t finished reading Wind in the Willows.’

‘Do you know what we say at school?’ shouted Clemmie, her face red with fury. ‘We say, go fuck your bottom in your face.’

She gave a scared, thrilled squeal and ran from the room.

There was a stunned silence, then Sasha said, ‘Did you hear what she said?’

‘You say goodbye,’ said Irene. A howl of laughter lodged like a bone in her throat and then came splintering out. ‘I’ll get them supper. OK?’

‘OK,’ said Adrian. His face was wet and grey.

Irene fried fish fingers and heated up a tin of baked beans. She poured apple juice into three tumblers and got the ice cream out of the freezer so it could defrost a bit. She looked out of the window at the leaves swirling in the garden, at the broken threads of rain. She looked at her hands and thought, these are the hands that held, loved, promised. She clenched them so that blue ropes of veins stood up on their backs, digging her broken nails into the softness of her palms. She waited until the minute hand on the clock moved round, and then again. Adrian said goodbye.

Thirteen

There are lots of ways to measure the time.

You can do it by getting through Halloween – trick or treating with the girls, carving battlement-grins into hollowed-out pumpkins, turning on the central heating and asking the bank for a loan – and Christmas (a soldier on a march: no time to stop, no time to look at anything except the ground just in front of her; left-right-left-right, and eyes ahead, thoughts pressed hard down inside her so they wouldn’t rise up and engulf her utterly) and New Year (don’t think, don’t turn back to last year), the grey corridor of January and February, when birds gather in black bunched shapes in bare trees and the monochrome sky presses down, and into Easter, spring at last.