Leo didn’t reply. Is this just Dad’s fantasy? A throwback to when his father felt Romy was always there for him? Because his mum’s behaviour earlier certainly hadn’t suggested she was on board with the idea.

‘The problem is, she seems to find me revolting,’ Michael added, in a musing sort of way.

Shocked out of his reverie, Leo said, ‘That’s a ridiculous thing to say, Dad.’

‘Is it?’ Michael turned away, apparently looking for his crutch, which was propped against the worktop behind him. He grabbed it. ‘I need a pee.’

Leo jumped up to help him, but his father pushed him away. ‘Didn’t you hear your mother?’ he snapped. ‘I’ve got to do this myself.’

He watched Michael clumping slowly towards the door and had to restrain himself from rushing to his side. He listened intently as the step/drag, step/drag and the clunking of the aluminium crutch faded along the corridor to the loo, then heard the door slam shut. He folded his arms on the table and dropped his head to rest on them. He felt for his father. It was almost painful to hear him say how much he loved his mum – and it was the only time Leo had ever heard it. But there’d been something in his mother’s face – he got the feeling she was ready to burst with pent-up emotion – something specifically directed at his father that she was hiding from them both. This isn’t just about Fincham, he decided. So what is it about?

38

Romy held herself together on the Tube to Embankment, the walk up to Charing Cross, the hour and a half on the train to Hastings. She felt as if she needed to keep pressing down on a living presence in her body, leaning heavily on it – as you might the contents of a bulging suitcase – so that it didn’t splurge out of her mouth in a horrific explosion.

She greeted Bettina, who picked her up from the station, and chatted inconsequentially on the short trip to her house in the centre of the old town, in a grand terrace close to the bakery she and Jost ran. She took her case up to her room and gazed longingly at the pristine sheets and plump duvet. She went downstairs and sat at the kitchen table, took the glass of cold Sancerre that her friend slid across to her. She took a large gulp, choked and sensed the presence inside her rumbling, then suddenly bursting its bonds. It was too late to stop it. Her cries thundered like the first waves of a massive tsunami.

Bettina, predictably, was calm, immediately enveloping her in a maternal hug from which Romy wanted never to be released. She clung to her friend, incoherent, wanting to explain so much that had happened and not knowing where to start. It was a long time before she could even catch her breath.