One of the myths concerned Noah, who herded all the animals into his ark, and these animals – sheep and goats and horses and rabbits and camels and llamas and dogs – all shed their coats and fleeces on the floor, and pissed and shat and trampled on them, so that when the ark finally reached land again and Noah herded the animals off, he discovered that the decks were carpeted in a homogenous mongrel felt.

Alone with Callum in his bright raw box of a house, she wondered if this would be the day when she finally raised with him the subject of his pain. It seemed to her that Callum was in pain: chronic, not acute; diffuse, not defined; a deep, unshakeable discomfort with himself, from which he had sought relief only in pitiful, disabling ways.

Exactly how much pain she could not determine. Whatever it was kept him low, but arrogant; it gave him a powerful sense of self that was composed almost entirely of absences and negations; and it both invited her attention and made him impossible to approach, like rolls of glittering concertina wire on top of a wall.

Had she suggested to Callum that he might be depressed, even suicidal, he would have looked at her with pity and contempt, as if she had tried to tell him that his head was on the wrong way around, or had been replaced by something outlandish: a pineapple, or an octopus. This was not necessarily a reason to duck the conversation. She might find it reassuring – his scorn was very firm, after all. But she never tried. She never said it.

Sometimes she sat there, facing him, like this, over a meal, thinking, ‘I really ought to ask him about it. What if I don’t, and something happens?’ But there was a counterbalancing fear in her that saying it would make it happen. Maybe what he remained unconscious of could do him no real harm. Or maybe there was nothing to be conscious of. Maybe he was just a melancholy, ironic person, but not dangerously so. Maybe his closeness to his mother was natural; Claire’s distance the unnatural thing.

Or maybe, she thought, maybe it was simply that she did not love him after all. You could get to know someone very well and still not love them. Familiarity bred – not contempt, but involvement. Implication. Love was something else: a free radical, a roaming grace that could not be predicted or deliberately produced.

Another myth: that Saint Clement and Saint Christopher, banished from Rome to the Chersonesus, tucked scraps of breakwool they found caught on thorns along the way into the soles of their sandals and under the straps to stop the pressure blistering their skin.