Arriving safely on the landing, she raised the phone to study her erstwhile husband properly. Lately, Lucas was big on being friends. The reason, as Esther well knew, was because someone called Heidi had been brought out of the shadows, a thirty-three-year-old postdoc from Heidelberg University – an acquaintance of some six months, Lucas maintained, though Esther had her doubts. This intellectual and physical bombshell of a woman (googled by Esther many times) had met both children now. ‘Oh yeah, Heidi’s nice,’ they had both insisted, facial expressions snapping shut like clams.

Heidi from Heidelberg! When Esther had told Viv they had laughed hysterically, and kept laughing, while inwardly Esther waged war with the illogical push-pull of not wanting something, but minding that someone else did.

Lucas’s luminous green eyes met hers steadily from the phone screen. They were intimidatingly alert, the skin around them still remarkably unlined for a fifty-two-year-old. Esther searched for some glint of all the early, lovable self-doubt, despite knowing it was long gone. Lucas was an eminent professor now. His books of literary criticism were on university reading lists across the country. He was a frequent speaker at international academic conferences. Milan. Prague. Frankfurt. He was quite the jet-setter. He even had his own YouTube channel, where he posted his lectures, and two thousand followers on Twitter. He had been on the telly once – a guest on a history series – as well as on a couple of artsy radio programmes, talking engagingly about things like modern takes on courtly love and the feminist themes to be found in his beloved Gawain. Even his dark hair looked sure of itself these days, Esther marvelled, closely cropped and barely peppered, springing from its roots with all the ebullience that had been in evidence when they first met twenty-five years before.

‘A birthday dinner of some kind, then?’ Lucas asked in his new jolly voice.

‘Yes, Lucas, a birthday dinner of some kind,’ Esther conceded tightly, finding the conversation no easier for the fact that Lucas had once been good at birthdays, before broken nights and infants hollering for bottles and breakfast cramped his style. He would pretend to forget and then wake her with a bed-tray of coffee, fresh berries, mounds of sunny scrambled eggs, and a garden flower-head lolling out of an egg cup. A parcel would be scrabbled for from under the bed, perfectly wrapped with inner layers of tissue paper and outer flourishes of trailing ribbon. Nestling inside would be something quirky or exquisite: a piece of porcelain, a first edition of poems by someone she hadn’t heard of, a kimono. Most of these gifts had long since been bagged up and taken to charity shops. Viv had supported the wisdom of this, but also told Esther not to be afraid when memories surged. They had their own validity, she said, and should be allowed to play themselves out; though sometimes Esther thought a lobotomy would be more effective.