“Touch her?”

“Sure, she doesn’t even have to know. Bump her, or touch when she isn’t looking.”

“Would that work?” Zen asked, unconvinced.

“I think so. It doesn’t hurt to try.”

“Okay.” Zen changed the subject. “What’s this present you promised to give me when I was nine?” Zen enquired, newly nine and with presents still on her mind.

“Are you sure you’re grown up enough?”

“I’m nine. Time’s passing. I’ll be in double figures soon.” She swept up her hair and regarded herself in the distressed mirror on the wall adjacent to the window. Zeno wondered at the constant preoccupation women had for the passing of time. He had never really thought about it until his eyes started to back up on him.

“It’s in two parts you see, this present,” his delivery slowing as thought added weight to it.

“Oh, come on then, Dad,” said Zen, who could smell procrastination a mile off.

“The first part,” began Zeno, not allowing his daughter’s impatience to influence him, “is that from now on you can have the bath to yourself on Fridays.”

“Okay, that’s the bad part. Now what’s the other?” She stuck out a lower lip, which Zeno knew from previous jarring was often accompanied by a gnashing of teeth.

“The exciting part is that now you’re nine, we are going to teach you how to breathe.”

“I already know how to breathe,” said Zen, snapping her jaws and rubbing her clenched teeth from side to side with that unnerving grating sound. “And who is ‘we’?”

Zeno dipped the sponge, the size of a rugger ball, into the water, and sponged the conditioner from his hair. It fell smooth and straight almost to his shoulders.

“By ‘we’ I mean all the people who have taught me, whose combined knowledge I am the sum total of. You won’t have to attend any extra classes . . .”

“But I know how to breathe,” she repeated, realising the surprise was not going to be the roller-skating boots signed by Raquel Welch that she was convinced would fit her now, and which Zeno still cherished.

Her dad reached out for one of the selection of towels which hung on heated brass pipes that almost covered the wall behind him, and, lifting his hair, twisted the towel into a turban with a practised movement. It was a gesture Zen usually relished. She liked the look it gave her dad, and signified the water part of their evening was at an end. To be followed, if he was in the mood, by a massage of her feet—‘zoning’, he called it. Today she was impervious to the twisted towel, and made faces at her own reflection.

Zeno pressed on. “There is a mystery about breath which few are aware of. As a matter of fact, I’d say about . . .” he mentally counted, watching her face in the mirror to see if he had captured her attention, “ . . . one in eight million.” He had.