His wife reaches up and kisses him. She has to stand on tiptoe. ‘I’ll be over there, reading the old graves.’

‘Now that is weird . . .’ He laughs.

‘Hey! It’s interesting!’ She throws him a smile over her shoulder as she wanders off towards an old cracked tombstone with a huge angel perched on top.

He watches her go in her long swishy summery skirt and tight T-shirt. Her shoulders are pushed back, her walk confident, the knot of strawberry-blonde hair on top of her head wobbling as she strides away towards the older part of the cemetery.

Then he turns back to his mum’s grave. ‘She’s being brave, Mum,’ he says. ‘She’s still not pregnant and I know she’s worried. We’ve been trying for nearly a year.’ He wonders if he’d have been so honest about this stuff if his mum was still alive. He stoops to take the dead roses out of the vase. The foetid smell of the rank water rises up his nostrils and hits the back of his throat. He shoves them into his plastic bag ready for the compost heap and replaces them with the fresh bouquet.

Theo visits every Saturday – mostly without Jen as she’s usually working at the beauty salon in town and only gets one Saturday off a month – and each time he hopes to see something other than his decaying flowers from the previous week, something to show his dad has visited. That he actually cares. But for years there has been nothing. It happened gradually over the first year or two, he supposes, looking back, his dad’s lack of interest. He suspects that his dad no longer visits the grave because he finds it too emotional. If he doesn’t visit he can pretend it hasn’t happened.