The question hurt. “No.”

“I guess you miss him?” she said.

Not since Martina had anyone asked about David; his mouth dried and his heart began to quicken. He wanted to describe what it feels like to find your boy in a pool of vomit and carry him to bed and mop him up and pretend in the morning you have not seen that. He wanted to say what it was like to be a child and find the man who was your father in the same manner. He wanted to say, What happened? Was it me? Am I the link here? But he didn’t. He didn’t want to burden her with so much. He nodded and said yes; he missed David.

Gripping his knees, he pictured himself lying in his room as a teenager, listening to the silence that did not hold his mother. He remembered hearing that Queenie had left, and sinking to his chair because she had not said goodbye. He saw Maureen, white with hatred, slamming the spare-room door. He relived the last time he had visited his father.

“I am terribly sorry,” the carer had said. She had Harold by his jacket sleeve and was almost tugging him out of range. “But he seems disturbed. Maybe you had better leave it for today.”

Glancing over his shoulder as he hurried away, his final impression had been of a small man throwing teaspoons and yelling he had no son.

How could he say all this? It amounted to a lifetime. He could try to find the words, but they would never hold the same meaning for her that they did for him. “My house,” he would say; and the image that would spring to her head would be of her own. There was no saying it.

Kate and Harold sat a while more in silence. He listened to the wind in the leaves of a willow, and watched them flicker. Spikes of rosebay willow herb and evening primrose glowed in the dark. From the camp fire came the sounds of laughter and shouts; Rich was organizing a nocturnal game of tag. “It’s getting late,” said Kate at last. “You need sleep.”