Under her fond expectant glare, Callum made a curious gesture, half shrug, half shudder, that seemed to Claire the soul of abjection.

‘How much did you pay?’ she asked.

This time the silence waited for him. He frowned again, slowly. ‘That isn’t really your—’

‘I think they let you pay a couple of hundred a month: more than Dean, who they probably charged nothing, so you’d know you were contributing more than him, but nowhere near what you’d have to pay in your own flat.’

‘Even if that was the arrangement,’ her mother said, ‘what’s wrong with that? Are you feeling hard done by?’

Of course it would sound that way. How could Claire describe the kinds of dependencies her mother had fostered – the one profoundly emotional, with a veneer of economic self-reliance; the other financial, practical, but emotionally null and void – without sounding like exactly what she was: the middle child, observant, too much left to her own devices, overlooked and disinherited on both sides? How could she explain that sparing Claire the worst of her attentions was the one true gift her mother had had to give?

‘I just – look at him,’ she said in despair, flinging a hand towards her brother. ‘Can’t you see how miserable he is?’

To which the pair of them responded with identical expressions of exaggerated disbelief that produced in them both the same firm rounded double chin.

‘I’m not,’ Callum said, meaning I’m not miserable, but unwilling to say the word.

‘You are. We all are. All three of us. It’s not a coincidence. She’s got three sad children.’

‘Dean’s not sad,’ her mother said.

‘He tried to kill himself!’

She looked bewildered. ‘He what? He never did that.’ Then she feigned realisation – ‘You mean the thing in the holidays?’ – and made an airy, wafting, dismissive gesture. ‘But that was years ago. He was just being silly about a girl. He’s fine now.’

‘Fine? No job? Staying out all night? Taking drugs?’

‘No-o,’ she said, with emphasis. ‘Didn’t he tell you? He’s going to university in the autumn. He got his place. He’s going to York.’

‘St John,’ Callum added.

‘Yes, that’s right. York St John.’

Claire’s gaze slid sideways and landed on the gravel. Where the shadow of the house lay across them, the chips of stone looked flat and dull, a uniform charcoal colour; but out of that shadow, in direct sun, they showed beautiful variegations of dove and slate and lilac, not only between separate chips, but within the individual chips themselves. Each glistened with the composite texture of millions of years of relentless compression.