The good news was that the room was absolutely huge. The bad news was that it had clearly been decorated by a very literal-minded painter and decorator back in the 1970s, because it was like stepping into a diabetic coma. Every surface was a sickly tan (or, at a stretch, caramel), excluding the ceiling, which was beige, and two ancient red velvet lounges and a matching red velvet bedspread across the double bed. But it was charming in an Addams Family meets Willy Wonka kind of way and at least it looked like we’d all fit.

“Great! There’s lots of room, anyway, isn’t there?”

I was too tired to try and make it sound very convincing, and I saw Leonard eyeing his window-seat bed with what could easily have been a few second thoughts. Norman, though, looked like he’d been given the keys to Edinburgh Castle itself. He’d managed to open one of the big bay windows and was hanging the top half of his body out, craning his neck to get a better look.

“Wow, Mum! This place is so cool!”

“Oh my God, Norman, be careful! Don’t lean so far out.”

Norman obediently slipped down the wall and grinned at me. Grinned.

“But Mum, it really is cool.”

For once in my life, I was grateful to have passed on the Foreman family trait of aiming low to avoid disappointment.

Fringe or no Fringe, we were definitely the only guests taking advantage of the Soft Fudge’s hospitality on that particular night, and perhaps since 1978. Of the other five doors on the upstairs level (we discovered, after I relented to Norman’s request to explore before going to bed), four of them were boarded up. The fifth was open just a crack and, when Norman pushed on it lightly, the wider crack revealed a room stacked so full of furniture that the door physically wouldn’t open much more than a few inches.

“Hey, Mum?” Norman whispered as we peered into the semidarkness. “Remember when you, me and Jax watched that telly show where the old guy hoarded so much they had to take the roof off his house?”

“Mmm. I certainly do, Norman.”

I also remembered that the real reason they’d taken the roof off was because the poor man had fallen and hit his head on the corner of a vintage pinball machine and the paramedics couldn’t get in to help him. I shut the door hard and shepherded Norman back to the Caramel Suite.

Even with Norman and me occupying the bed and Leonard curled up on the lumpy window seat, the Caramel Suite was big enough not to feel awkward. The regular but indeterminable noises coming from Leonard’s creaky old body and the soft banging of the plumbing from inside the walls seemed to soothe Norman, and he fell asleep within minutes. But despite being dog-tired, I lay awake, savoring the presence of his warm, still body next to mine.

A sporadic burst of drunken shouting and the sound of cars going past every now and again even at that early hour of the morning made me realize how quiet our house in Penzance was. Most often, the first sound of my day was the guy across the road starting his delivery van at 5:00 a.m. If I concentrated hard, I could hear the crash of the waves on the foreshore as the noise of his motor faded away, and there were times I was tempted to get up and go for a walk. But I hadn’t walked on the beach for years, even though I knew that the sting of the salty wind on my face would probably feel quite wonderful. The thought of the sand squeezing up between my toes without my father there in his rolled-up shorts and vest seemed impossible. And so it was.