When the boys were little, and scared about something, she used to say to them, ‘Just put one foot in front of the other,’ and that’s what she did now, making her way to the bus stop and joining a small queue of people there. A young woman with a pram was jiggling it backwards and forwards in an attempt to distract a baby that was emitting hiccupy sounds of misery. The woman’s eyes had lilac smudges beneath them and her long red hair was greasy at the roots. Irene gave her a sympathetic smile and the woman looked surprised for a moment, almost as though she felt caught out in her thoughts, then she rewarded Irene with a returned smile.

‘How old?’ Irene said, peering into the pram and seeing a baby so tiny it still bore the wrinkled, shocked look of the newly hatched.

‘Three weeks,’ said the woman quietly. Irene looked up to see her eyes were now brimming with tears.

She patted the hand that was holding the handle of the pram and said, ‘It will get so much easier. I promise you that, sweetheart,’ and the woman nodded her thanks and lowered her eyes.

Climbing onto the bus, Irene felt a stab of guilt at what she had said. If only sleepless nights were the hardest bit of parenting. She hadn’t expected to be worrying herself sick in the wee small hours about her children when it had been thirty-four years since she had given birth.

When, twenty minutes later, she arrived at the street where Michael was renting the attic room, she looked up and down for his car. But there was no sign of it.

That didn’t mean anything in itself, she told herself, as she got to the terraced house where he lived. He might just be out.

Her stomach turned over as she pictured him lying on an unmade bed with an empty bottle of pills next to him. It would be so unlike him to do something like that though, wouldn’t it? He had never been the one to take drugs. Not after his brother.

But life hadn’t been especially kind to him lately. Breaking up with Linda had really cut him up, however much he’d claimed he was ‘better off without her’.

Irene was glad they didn’t have any children of their own, even though she would have loved grandchildren. It would have made the break-up even harder on everyone.