‘Good morning, sir.’

He looked round. Måns was carrying his breakfast in on the tray. The grey hair was now snowy white, the upright deportment softened to a slumped stoop in the seven years he had been ‘away’ – as it was referred to by the family – a slight tremor in the hands these days; but he remained the man he had known all his life, quiet but indomitable. Dependable. Always in his corner. Seeing everything, but saying nothing. The living embodiment of discretion being the greater part of valour. Their first words to one another, after he’d come home, had been about whether he still wanted sugar in his coffee.

‘Another beautiful day, sir.’

‘Yes, isn’t it?’ he replied, walking out of the sunny patch and back into the cool of the room. Unlike everything else in this house, he and Måns were the only things changing in it. The walls were panelled and still painted the same soft pearl grey of his boyhood, the reed-legged brick-red linen settle still pushed against the end of the bed, the moody August Strindberg oils – which his teenage self had wanted to replace with Green Day posters – still hanging between simple crystal wall chandeliers. He stared at Måns’s polished shoes on the rug as he set down the tray; there was a tiny red mark in the linen fibres; it looked like a bloodstain, but he knew it wasn’t that. He knew precisely what it was and how it had come to be there – a lingonberry unwittingly transported in on the knee of his jeans after playing in the garden when he was seven. His eyes roamed the pale, striped rug, finding other marks of long-forgotten moments – the splash of coffee after his father trod on a Lego brick and stumbled, the small ash burn from his mother’s cigarette as she kissed him goodnight before a party, Nina’s make-up from where she would sit cross-legged on the floor and doll herself up as he watched from his bed, planning her midnight escape from his window (because unlike her, he had the veranda below), her own bed expertly stuffed with pillows; she had had a leather jacket that year: grey, with buckles. It was a curious thing, he marvelled, staring at the innocuous stains beneath their manservant’s feet, how great swathes of his memories remained defiantly blank, and yet others were as fresh and sparkling as this morning’s dew.

He watched Måns set down the tray in what had always been the usual place, when this had been his room – on the desk, now cleared of childish scribbles and notes. He stared at the platter: ham, honey, bread, apricot compote. As a boy, he had only ever been allowed to eat in his room if he was sick, and it still felt vaguely itinerant to be eating in here now, just because. But he had wanted to soak up the energy of this space once more before his child got here. He had missed out on so much of his son’s childhood – how could he connect except by remembering the boy he had been, living in this room?