And directly in front of me there are all the hangers with her dresses and skirts and shirts and jackets and tops. Lots of white cotton but splashes of colour too, although you can’t see it in this light. But there are orange silks and blue batik and gauzy things spangled with silver. Soft as a feather, light as a sigh.

I spread my arms wide and sort of gently fall against it, pressing my face into her clothes, her essence, the old life.

I breathe her in.

And then I sleep.

Chapter 5

5

THE CHILDREN HAD painted their families. An entire wall in the classroom was covered with pictures of brightly coloured stick figures. At five they were starting to make sense of the world and their place in it.

The stick-figure mothers had long flowing hair, squiggly lines of black, brown and yellow, and some of them held a sausage-shaped package with a circle for its head – a baby brother or sister. The fathers were mostly bigger stick-insect figures, and nearly all of them carried brown squares and rectangles – briefcases. All of the pictures seemed to be full of life, crowded with parents, siblings, stick figures of assorted shapes and sizes.

Apart from Scout’s.

‘Look, that’s my one,’ she said.

How could I miss it?

In Scout’s picture there was just an unsmiling stick-figure daddy with no briefcase, a little stick-figure girl with huge brown eyes, and at our feet a small red four-legged daub – Stan.

We had left the dog at home that morning, to his high-pitched howls of rage and despair, because once a month the parents were allowed into the classroom to look at the children’s work. It was meant to be a happy time. But I looked at her picture as parents and children jostled around us and I did not know what to say.

Most of the dads were dressed in suits and ties and carrying briefcases, while the mothers were either dressed for the office or for exercise, and some of the ones who were dressed for the gym were carrying babies or shepherding toddlers. So there was definitely a social realism about the pictures.

A young teacher, a blonde New Zealander, Miss Davies, watched us all with a kindly smile.

‘Do you like it?’ Scout said, disturbed by my silence.

‘I love it,’ I said.

The truth was it tore at my heart. The surrounding whiteness in Scout’s picture seemed to overwhelm the three little figures. And I felt it again, as I knew I would feel it for ever. The completeness of other families, and the shattered nature of what was left of ours.

I placed my hand on Scout’s shoulder and she looked up at me with her mother’s eyes.

‘Good work, Scout,’ I said.

‘Miss Davies said just family,’ she said and, suddenly losing interest, wandered off to her desk to prepare for the first lesson.