He stood in the doorway, pale, a leather duffel bag over his shoulder, looking down on me from above. His heavy coat hung open over a jersey full of holes, and when he lifted me up and pressed my face against his chest I could feel the dampness of the wool. Mother was standing behind me, in the kitchen. Her ragged sobs were drowned out by the weather forecast on the radio.

The following Sunday we went to Mass. With my father holding one hand, my mother the other, I entered that lofty space for the first time. The tops of the chestnut trees in the churchyard were swaying behind the stained-­glass windows, and the brightly coloured saints looked as if they were alive.

The wind blew in with us through the door, sending flickering waves through the flames on the rows of votive candles. Mother held her hands over them and told me to do the same.

We’re warming our hands on people’s wishes, she said.

The pews were packed. In their dark coats, fur hats on their bowed heads, the congregation looked like a herd of tired, heavy animals. Here and there a whisper was heard, a stifled cough, a creak in the wood.

Breath steamed.

When the organ began to play, I wanted to jump up and run outside. The sound filled the space right up to the cross vault. It seemed to have the power to burst the walls. Then I felt my mother’s hand on my knee, and I stayed.

I started to sense the urge during the Kyrie, and by the end of the first reading I could hardly bear it.

I need to go, I said.

Not now, said Father.

I tried to hold it in. Doubled up, fists pressed into my lap, I sat between my parents’ stiff coats, murmuring invocations. During the Gospel I started crying quietly, and during the cleansing of the Temple, I sat down again.

I need to go, I said.

Sit still, said Father.

So I opened my arms and let go. When the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory, declared the priest at the front of the church as I wet my trousers and the tears ran down my face.

You’ll wear those trousers until you go to bed. You are a disgrace to God the Father.

It was also on a Sunday, almost fourteen years later, that Father died of the lung disease he had struggled with ever since returning home. The end, when it came, was quick; there was no one to whom he needed to say goodbye, and before midday he was carried out of the house, as shrivelled and light as a bundle of dry brushwood.

A few weeks later, my mother followed him. Heading home with a full shopping basket on her arm, she suddenly stopped, tilted back her head, and seemed for a few moments to focus on a distant point in the cloudless sky before lurching to one side and falling down dead in the middle of the pavement. Four big red summer apples rolled out of the basket into the road where they lay for a while, shining in the sun, until, one after another, they were caught beneath the wheels of the rush-­hour traffic.