He had grown thinner. Never a fleshy person in the first place, he started to look like the photos you see of people who walked out of the concentration camps after the war. Well, perhaps that is an exaggeration – perhaps Peter was right when he called me Dorcas-prone-to-exaggeration-Wilson – but his skinniness was noticeable. He had put more holes in his Sunday belt and his pants had a gathered look about them. His cuffs hung over his shoes, and I noticed he must have stepped back on them a few times because they looked a bit grubby and raggedy. His suit jacket used to fit him just right, but now it had lots of room between his buttons and his tummy. And his white shirt gaped around his neck, even with a tie knotted around it. He wore the same blue tie every week, even though it had a gravy stain on it. He didn’t smell of Old Spice. He smelled of unaired suit and the air-conditioner stuff Mum sprayed in the car.

He hadn’t been to the barber since Mum had left and the curls in his black hair were unruly and had lost their shine. The tiny bits of grey he used to have just at the temples had spread like an infection down his sideburns and into the big curls at either side of his part. Dad grew a beard very fast, and although he shaved every morning, by the time he got home from work, you could see the dark shadow where the beard was desperately trying to force its way onto his face. Some nights, before Mum had left for Scotland, he would chase us and rub his bristly chin on our faces until we worked ourselves up to something that was a cross between hysterical laughing and screaming in fear. One Sunday I was pretty sure he hadn’t shaved at all.

Caleb still liked to shine Dad’s shoes, and on Sundays would insist Dad took them off when he visited Aunty Maisie for tea, so he could take them to the laundry for a good going-over. Caleb said it was obvious Dad wasn’t cleaning them himself, and that worried all of us, because Dad and Mum had always been sticklers for clean shoes.

When Caleb told Ruthy and I about the shoes we both gasped, and Ruthy covered her mouth with her hands in shock. I reminded them of what Mum called one of her ‘maxims’: ‘There’s no excuse for being any less than clean, polite and well shod’. But then I felt sad because I heard myself say, ‘Mum used to say,’ rather than using the present or the future tense. I wondered what my future tense would be.

But the worst sign of all was the hanky. Dad always had a clean, ironed hanky in his pocket. It had to have no stains on it at all for Sunday use, and he liked to match the stripe on his hanky with the colour of his tie. And it wasn’t that Mum wasn’t around to do it for him, because this was something Dad did himself. After Mum had done the ironing in the lounge room, she would sit with a cup of tea and Dad would press his hankies and iron them into exactly the size and shape he liked for his pockets.