She could feel her mother watching her, hungry for a reaction to the news. But Dean’s change of heart about university was not a sign of genuine independence. It wasn’t even a bid for his father’s approval. It was just a response to what Claire had done – had failed to do – when the department refused her dissertation. Impossible to mark, they said. Not scholarly. A piece of creative writing. Rather wonderful, in its way very captivating, but not what they needed to satisfy the requirements of the degree. She shouldn’t worry, though. She could rewrite and resubmit. She’d probably still get a 2:1. This – the lack of consequence, the toothlessness of academe – as much as her pig-headed pride in what she’d written, made her baulk. No, she’d said. There ought to be a place for creative criticism. If not, the degree was meaningless.

They reasoned with her. They gave her months of grace. They said if only she’d told them in advance what she was doing, they could have helped; but now they’d raised the red flag they couldn’t put it down. The more they told her this – the more they emphasised the bureaucratic nature of the obstacle – the more stubborn she became, at first replying to their emails in high dudgeon, then slowly, slowly, as the line didn’t change, easing herself away, checking her messages less and less often, throwing herself into life at the bar, where she listened closely when the townies critiqued the weak grasp students had on the hard real world.

And Dean, whom she hardly thought about, had received the whole drama third-hand from Callum, if not second-hand from his mother, and seen a brightness opening in the dark sky of his alienation; though he would not have thought about it quite like that. He would believe he’d arrived independently at the decision to break strike.

‘I can’t believe he didn’t tell you,’ Claire’s mother said. ‘But then …’ – and here she made another face that said what did you expect? – ‘you haven’t been in touch for quite a while.’

‘Which makes sense,’ Callum said, cautiously. ‘If you’re saying you’ve been sad.’

It was a pincer movement: she felt them both advance upon her psychically, lowering their spears, holding up nets. Her studied absence, her determination to make it on her own in Manchester, which she had transmitted to them as a signal of her strength, had not been received that way at all; had been scrambled past comprehension when it reached them, transmuted to a cry of pain. They were going to recast her in the family myth.