‘Yeah, come on, Dad,’ Dylan urged, insolent now, and baiting, ‘let’s have it. Gramps was like this total drunk, who lost his job and made your life hell. Which is why you left, and Granny… did what she did…’ He faltered, adding in a much smaller voice, ‘Is that it?’

‘Dylan, that’s enough…’ Esther cried, but Lucas held up his hand again.

He had flinched at Dylan’s onslaught, but then tightened his face into a mask. ‘You have the gist of it exactly, Dylan. And maybe, at a more appropriate moment, I shall be able to explain the effects of lovelessness and fear, of adult dysfunction and sadness, day in, day out, on an only child.’ He fired the words like bullets, his eyes greener than Esther had ever seen them, and more desperate. ‘But in the meantime, forgive me if there were aspects of my upbringing with which I have not wanted to burden my own children. And now your mother is right, we should get this over with and go inside.’

‘Okay…’ Dylan was caving visibly, his shoulders dropping, his burst of defiance past. ‘But, so you know,’ he muttered, picking up his bag, ‘he, like, really doesn’t drink now, and also it’s obvious he misses Granny loads. Her ashes are under that tree, by the hives.’ They all looked, in the spell of the moment still, as he threw an arm in the direction of two barely visible white humps and a tree in the snowscape to the right of the cottage. ‘She did the bees, and when they swarmed off recently, you’d think he’d lost her all over again. And also, sorry, Dad,’ he blurted, ‘but when someone ends their life, it’s like they are doing it, right? Not anyone else.’

In the stunned silence that followed, John opened the door. ‘If you’re coming in, then get on with it,’ he grunted. ‘I’ve put the kettle on.’

45

Once known, a person could not become unknown, that was the problem. Esther had given up on sleep and rolled onto her back, letting the thought take her over, as it had been clamouring to do. The days of worrying about Lucas should have been well behind her, but in the twenty-four hours since they had braved entry into the cottage, it was the incessant, involuntary monitoring of her ex-husband’s state of mind that had been getting her down the most. No aspect of the situation was easy for any of them; but for Lucas, she knew, it was like his worst nightmare. Even being aware of that was a burden. Having to witness the undercurrents of emotion raging beneath his rigid show of compliance, finding it so painful sometimes that she simply had to look the other way.