‘Here’s your knickers,’ I say. ‘Are you going to stand up for me?’ I hold the knickers out so she can step into them. ‘No? All right then.’

I lift her left foot, guiding it into the elastic hole. And as I lift her right foot I smell her there above me, all sleepy brushed cotton and something faintly vinegary, and I find myself stopping and dropping her foot back down again, so she’s sitting there with her knickers round one ankle, and I’m resting my cheek against her shin and mouthing Robert without making a sound and knowing our son is dead.

She must feel my breathing go heavy, because she puts her hand on my head and we sit like that for a few minutes, my knees digging into our thin purple carpet, my cheek feeling the dry tissue of her shin and the knobbles of bone in there, all rounded, like a row of marbles.

‘I should have bought a black dress,’ she says.

I lift her right foot again. ‘No, no. It’s all right. People don’t wear all black at funerals these days.’

I guide the knickers beyond her knees. ‘Lift your bottom up for me.’

I keep thinking of the time I took Robert to the Tank Museum. Kathryn refused to come in, waited in a café down the road, wearing her red raincoat (she used to wear a lot of red), sipping a milky coffee, reading a novel. At least, that’s how I imagined her as I walked around that place, yards of camouflage and unspeakable weapons everywhere.

In that museum there were lots of fathers and sons. All the fathers seemed to have big hands with which to guide their sons around the Whippet, the Sherman Crab and the Somua tanks. They would stoop and point, ruffle hair, share interesting facts. I didn’t know anything about those grey and brown hunks of metal. I knew about turbine halls, not armoured vehicles.

I walked behind Robert as he ran ahead. I’d never seen him so excited. I let him weave between the tanks with his anorak wrapped around his waist in the way he liked. I smiled as he sat in the cockpit of the armoured Rolls-Royce, his hair sticking up on the crown of his head, his straight teeth shining.

When we got back to the café she embraced him as if he’d been gone for weeks, and he told her all about the tanks in one long breath, and her eyes lit up at the very mention of the word missile, even though she’d refused to set foot in that place. ‘Did you enjoy it, Howard?’ she asked me. I hesitated. Robert said, ‘Dad hated it.’ And they laughed.

The iciness of the kitchen floor seeps through the thin soles of my slippers. I warm my hands in the steam of the kettle. The blind with the fruit and veg print is moving slowly in the draught from the window. Sucked in, blown out. I drop the cold tea bag from the pot into the bin. I can’t cook like Kathryn so the bin is full of empty tins. She used to feed Robert plenty of meat; chops grilled with a little salt, boiled potatoes and tinned peas on the side. I never understood it. She doesn’t like meat much, but for her son she let the fat ooze over the bars of the grill and fill the kitchen with a sweet stink.