‘You don’t need to do that,’ Claire said, annoyed at the formality. ‘I can stand at the counter like anyone else.’ He didn’t stop. The butter came out, the French press for a pot of real coffee. His hatred of ceremony could sometimes manifest itself in a rigid adherence to domestic ritual. Claire, knowing exactly where he’d keep his open bag of coffee, went to the freezer and fished it out.

‘Do you think you’d better ring the gallery?’ he asked.

That too: the insistence on ordinary courtesy, even for those who didn’t deserve it. Perhaps especially for them.

‘They’re not paying me properly, you know.’

‘But you did agree—’

‘They’re not paying me properly, so they’re exploiting me. And it’s boring. What? You think I ought to apologise to them or something? They ought to apologise to me.’

A gurn of disapproval crossed the deliberate blandness of his face. She’d wanted that. Let him see her ego, her imperiousness; how much freer she was than him.

Once upon a time, her plan had been to be the big sibling he had never been for her: the one who breaks the pattern; who shows the way. But coming home from university that first summer, she’d found that Callum’s conversation had become so aggressively banal that she could hardly stand to talk to him. It was like he’d sworn off saying anything remotely interesting ever again – as if he wanted to present only the smoothest, sheerest, most purchaseless front. She wished she could say that she had chipped away at this, but she hadn’t. She’d felt mulish about it. Fucked if she was going to be interesting for him.

When they were kids, everything Callum said had been amusing. One Easter they had stayed at a purpose-built holiday village in the Yorkshire Dales, with log cabins, tennis courts, ‘entertainments’, a simmering green swimming pool that stank of disinfectant, and perimeter fencing, ‘for the safety of our guests’, that ran between what looked like wooden watchtowers in the trees.

‘Look,’ Callum had said, pointing out the towers on the first afternoon. ‘If ve do not participate, ve vill be shot!’

All of them had laughed at this: Claire for real, Dean in imitation, her parents with anxious bonhomie. Callum had been off school for two weeks – not suspended, not poorly, just off – and there was a force field of nervous tension surrounding him, demanding gentle treatment. Nobody told Claire why. Perhaps other sisters would have pressed to know more, but she was content with the facts she was given, like a cat with its ounce of dry food. She had also been content to collaborate in the story that the force field had vanished once Callum returned to school, even as they all continued to live beneath its shining dome.