By the time he got back to Holford Road he felt better. He sat on one of the tall white stools in the kitchen, and looked at property online, and wondered why he’d got so worked up. Through the glass, the fairy lights were tested – on-off, on-off – like regimented fireflies. Liv had disappeared to her room to get ready, and he didn’t know where Griff was. There was a readiness about the house, the calm before the party. He was separated as completely from the confused feelings of his day as a space station from the Earth. He could prepare himself for Bea’s reaction. Where her family was involved she was uncharacteristically irrational. It was tempting not to tell her. If he turned Griff down, she need never know. He thought of all the husbands and boyfriends who routinely lied to their women. He had grown up around men to whom secrecy bordered on a belief system. They made every trip to the pub a victory against the matriarchy, and smoking weed or a lunchtime lap dance not just dicking about, but an assertion of the self. As a child, his friends’ fathers were mostly of the lie-to-the-wife, betting-shop variety, or, like his, not there. On film, men were either reluctant husbands and fathers, or violently avenging their conveniently murdered wives or children. Extreme violence was justified to save the wife. At college he’d caught on that Hollywood’s expedient morality was more a tool of political propaganda than intended role model. His mother dismissed his indignation. Dan, you think too much! His mother, the constant worrier, with her late-onset godliness, her stultifying belief. It’s just a movie, she’d say, followed by, Go outside! Kick a ball around! – like they were living in the 1970s. He didn’t condemn her. She was all right. She had pinned up his drawings on the fridge door when he was small. She had kept him safe. She was a good mother, on her day. But she was not a father. Negotiating maleness had been, as Bea would put it, complicated for Dan. Thou shalt not kill, unless provoked. Thou shalt not commit adultery, except, like Dan’s own father, fucking off back to whiter-than-white Surrey. There was no commandment about being in league with thy father-in-law, but Dan knew a sin when he saw it. He did not have a god, but he had Bea. He wasn’t going to lie to her. She would understand. She always understood.