It was the day of the birth. The day his grandson died. The day they had stumbled as a family, numb with disbelief, out into a world of sharp biting sunlight and traffic and the chattering of journalists waiting on the other side of the building. The nurse had guided them out of a side entrance, where no one would see them, and they would be driven back to their homes so they could have some time, some rest, some space to recover. Had she actually used that word, recover? He couldn’t remember. What he remembered saying was:

‘Come home, Kaz.’

And it had been the wrong thing. So utterly the wrong thing. Kaz was clutching on to Rosie, their heads pressed close together as though they wanted only each other in the world and everything else to disintegrate. And they had been ushered towards two cars – of course, he’d thought, we have to take two, there are too many of us – and he’d watched as Kaz and Rosie climbed into the back of the first car along with Rosie’s mum and Holly, who was impenetrable now, her eyes locking on to no one. And they’d driven off. The driver of their car was motioning to them, but Karl just stood there watching his son drive away with his other family.

Of course, Holly had invited them back to the house as well – of course, they were all one family. Except you never really were all the same family, were you? Because there’d only been one time when he’d felt that completeness, and that was many years ago, when he’d been surrounded by brothers and sisters, and he’d known with a deep certainty that his mum would always comfort him when he was sad, and that his dad would always know the right thing to do. He’d looked at Cris, seen his red eyes but felt too exhausted to pull him close. He had run out of whatever it was that propelled him. In the car, sitting together on the back seat as the driver made his way through the busy roads towards west London, he’d looked at Cris and said: ‘I don’t know what to do.’

Eva and Piotr were standing on a quiet residential street of semi-detached Georgian houses, with neat, walled front gardens and well-shaped shrubs. It was not quite suburbia – the gardens were too small for that, the houses cuddled too close – but it was a different world to the gritty north London of their old flat, or the gently preserved spaciousness that surrounded Eva’s home.