He talks to the nurses about the many people who have left him, and they nod with sympathy and impatience. Gerry ward is full of the abandoned, and for all his grief and anger, Jason is visited by his daughter every day. Such a respectable lady, whisper the staff, and her husband an actual MP. They don’t understand what more he wants, with such a good daughter to take care of him.

Each evening, when Janet leaves, he takes stock of his body. Often it is tense from the effort of being in a room with her, both of them straining towards cordiality. He lies stiffly, listening to the other inhabitants creaking around getting ready for bed. Although he still has most of his teeth, he can’t be bothered to brush them very often. He doubts he’ll be around long enough to see them rot.

It is hard to accept this decrepitude, which the nurses seem to think is all you can expect at his age (he’s 76, not even that old these days). Jason would really like to be one of those smiling centenarians, usually Japanese, who appear in newspapers attributing their continued good health to genes and a daily glass of brandy, lively eyes looking out from a mass of origami-fold wrinkles. A hundred seems like a good age, although the doctors have told him that he’ll probably not see out the year, or even the month (in fact, he suspects they wish he wouldn’t, so they can have their bed back—there are shortages). In any case, long lives are probably the domain of the guiltless, those at peace.

•

He knows he hasn’t always been a good father. In his defence, it was unusual for a man to be left in charge of children back in those days. He had help, naturally, after Siew Li went away: from his mother (and hers, though he didn’t like to ask after a while—she just cried all the time). Mollie helped for a while, but she had her own baby, then she was gone too. Sometimes Jason wonders if they could have stayed a family, had Mollie continued to be there. His mind slips into a familiar groove: what if Mollie had lived? What if his children had grown up alongside her Stella? He imagines them all sitting together after school, feasting on jam sandwiches.

He wonders if he should have joined forces with his brother-in-law, but he never had much time for Barnaby—even when they’d both lost their wives, and were falling apart from within, they still barely spoke. Barnaby was weak, had always been. So the two fathers brought up their children separately, sunk in isolation, even as the kids grew closer.