Frannie and Joe don’t answer her.

37.

Joe

Saturday night at their parents’ house. Joe looks forward to it each week, but always returns home in a bad mood. Lydia didn’t want to come tonight, has been strange with him all week, each night asking him what Evan did, each night being moody when he refused to tell her.

Cathy has left Macca at home this time. ‘He’ll just beg for cheese,’ she’d said glumly, evidently feeling tense too.

Their parents live in an old farmhouse on the edge of Warwickshire – far enough away from their cottages that they have to call before swinging by, which suits them just fine. It’s an L-shaped house with two annexes – one they use as a bar and one for storing wood. They’re sitting in the bar now with two old yellow Labradors, the door flung open on to the July rain, which drips in, fat splashes ricocheting off the wooden floor. It’s a tiny room, six stools around a little island, a few bottles of wine and beer, a dartboard in one corner. Not an actual bar, as Joe often points out. More of a shed.

Paul has gone up to bed, and the atmosphere has soured somewhat since he left. There is no conduit through which they can channel their love for each other. No hilarious dinosaur outbursts – Stegosaurus! – shouted with a lisp at dinner-time – or the word ‘yes’, said over and over – recently learnt, but in an American accent. Joe heard his father imitate it, earlier – yayus – and had been so surprised by the lightness in his tone.

‘Glad Italy was good anyway,’ their father says stiffly to them. Joe looks steadfastly down into his half-drunk pint so that he won’t exchange any glances with his sisters.

‘It was,’ Joe says into his lap. He looks at his father, smiling benignly, and Joe feels ten years old again, wanting so badly to impress him, wanting to confide and to confess. Wishing he were still that age, that Peanut was still alive, waiting to curl up on his pillow. That Frannie and Cathy were still his father’s responsibility and not – somehow – Joe’s.

‘Is Verona safe?’ Maria says.

‘Honestly,’ Joe says. The question irritates him more than usual, because Verona, evidently, isn’t safe: or it wasn’t for Will anyway. ‘It’s fine,’ he adds tightly. ‘Honestly. It’s Italy. We didn’t go to Iraq.’

Maria doesn’t smile. Their father ignores the exchange, gets the darts out of the cabinet and sets up the dartboard. ‘One game?’ he says hopefully to Joe, ever the stifled diplomat, ever the peacemaker.

As they play, their mother asks about the outcome of a terrier with a luxating patella, and Joe thinks of the limping Jack Russell he saw back in Verona the day he used Will’s card in the cashpoint. Yesterday, a nurse asked him to cannulate a tricky chihuahua and he wanted to hide under the desk rather than open a vein and smell the blood. Surgery is meditative for him usually. Cathy prefers medicine, figuring out the Rubix cube. She knows every single drug interaction off by heart, can give you a differential on protein in the urine in five seconds flat. It’s why they’ve always made such a good pairing. But now he’s lost, and he suspects she is too.