He watched as she punctured the first pocket of pus with a needle. He didn’t flinch. She pressed out the fluid, careful to leave the flap of skin intact. Harold allowed her to guide his left foot towards the bucket of soft, warm water. It was an intensely private act; almost between the woman and his foot, and not the rest of him. He looked at the ceiling so as not to look in the wrong place. It was such an English thing to do, but he did it anyway.

He had always been too English; by which he supposed he meant that he was ordinary. He lacked colour. Other people knew interesting stories, or had things to ask. He didn’t like to ask, because he didn’t like to offend. He wore a tie every day but sometimes he wondered if he was hanging on to an order or a set of rules that had never really existed. Maybe it would have been different if he’d had a proper education. Finished school. Gone to university. As it was, his father had presented him with an overcoat on his sixteenth birthday and shown him the door. The coat wasn’t new; it smelt of mothballs, and there was a bus ticket in the inside pocket.

“It seems sad to see him go,” said his Aunty Sheila, though she didn’t cry. Of all the aunts she had been his favourite. She bent towards him to offer a kiss, bringing such waves of scent he had to walk away in order not to be silly and hug her.

It had come as a relief to leave his childhood behind. And even though he had done what his father never had – he had found work, supported a wife and son, and loved them, if only from the sidelines – it sometimes occurred to Harold that the silence of his early years had followed him into his marital home, and lodged itself behind the carpet and curtains and wallpaper. The past was the past; there was no escaping your beginnings. Not even with a tie.

Wasn’t David the proof of that?

Martina lifted his foot to her lap and dried it in a soft towel, taking care not to rub. She squirted antibiotic cream on to her finger and applied it in small strokes. A deep blush mottled the soft dip below her throat. Her face was knotted with concentration. “You should be wearing two pairs of socks. Not one. And why haven’t you got walking boots?” She didn’t look up.

“I intended to buy them when I got to Exeter. But then, after so much time on the road, I changed my mind. I looked at the shoes on my feet and they seemed perfectly all right. I couldn’t see why I needed new ones.”