“It’s going to be okay,” he was saying, his voice quieter and more serious than any he was accustomed to use with his family. “It’s going to be fine, I promise. It’s all going to be fine, sweetheart.”

Still in the hall, Lulu froze. Her father, she knew, had curious nicknames for some of those close to him. He called Fee “ball and chain” and “blight of his existence”; he called his sister, Lulu’s sweet-natured aunt Katy, “Attila the Hun”; he and his best friend, Phil, in legacy of a joke long since passed into the mists of forgotten hilarity, had for many decades addressed each other as “honeybunch.” He did not call anyone whom she knew of “sweetheart.”

“Me, too,” he said now. “Me, too, sweetheart, oh, me, too. No, Fee hasn’t noticed. Fee doesn’t seem to notice very much of anything about me these days. I’ll see you tomorrow, then. Bye, sweetheart. Bye, Jane.”

More quietly than she had ever done in her life, Lulu opened and closed the front door and stole silently down the front steps to the street outside.

Lulu had always thought—on the rare occasions when she had thought about her parents’ marriage—that that marriage was a happy one. Her parents made each other laugh and did not appear to fight unduly, functioned happily during their time apart but seemed pleased to see each other when they reunited. It was true that her mother, with her American vowels and outspoken opinions, hardly fitted the stereotype of the middle-class English wife; but then her mother made it plain that she had never aspired to fit any sort of stereotype anywhere. It was true, too, that her father was in the habit of making jokes about a fantasy wife who was as different from his real wife as it was possible to be; but then her father made jokes about most things. Or rather, thought Lulu now, walking away from the house and down the streets that she had known all her life but that were now subtly changed, tilted on a different axis, as if she were drunk or in a fever, her father made jokes about most things when he was talking to his wife and to his daughters; apparently, when he was talking to the woman called Jane whom he also addressed as “sweetheart,” he did not make jokes at all.