‘Fresh mint tea, and I’ve done a quick google of flights.’ Brian set a large steaming mug on the table in front of her. ‘There’s one that leaves at eleven-thirty with plenty of seats. I’ve sent you the link. And by the way, nothing is always easy, for Viv or anyone else.’ He was gripping the back of the chair next to Esther’s. ‘Dylan will come through this and be absolutely fine, you know that, don’t you?’ he went on in a rush. ‘Didn’t Lucas do a similar runner at a similar stage?’

Esther looked up sharply. It was easy to forget that the men had once known each other quite well, though the friendship had always been about her and Viv, rather than any merging of their two families. ‘That was very different, Brian,’ she murmured, knowing he was only trying to be kind. She reached into the glass and gently fished out the limp, twitching insect with the tip of her finger. ‘You mean Lucas leaving home the moment he got his place at Manchester, because things there were so bad…?’

‘Yes, because of his father’s problems and—’

‘Lucas getting away wasn’t about space,’ Esther interjected, bridling again at Viv’s glib verdict on Dylan, ‘so much as survival. His mother wasn’t as brave, or as lucky. John was an incubus, Lucas used to say, sucking the life and hope out of everything.’

Brian nodded sadly. ‘His mother. The suicide. I remember. A bad business.’

‘Yes,’ Esther muttered, momentarily lost to the recollection of the handful of occasions on which she had met her father-in-law; the kid-glove politeness she had shown, while quailing inwardly because of what she had been allowed to know about the benders and the rages, and the enforced conspiracy of silence that had enabled him to continue practising medicine until some brave local whistle-blowers had put a stop to it. He had had the unmistakeable, dead eyes of a drunk. The memory of Lucas’s mother, Linda, was even harder; a small careworn woman, who had never been more than a foot or two from John’s side, like a beaten dog currying favour. Intermittent, early efforts by herself and Lucas to persuade her of other life-options – with their support – had been ignored. She had not known she had her own breaking point, it seemed to Esther, until it arrived.