He had a sudden sickening conviction that Claire would have told this story to Caro, and that Caro would have affirmed all the worst aspects of Claire’s telling – would have said stupid things about sexuality being weirder than convention allows, about girls all maturing at different rates, about how loads of her friends slept with their teachers and they’re all fine, are liberated even, what passes for liberated in Caro’s world, piercing their tongues and making shit art and living in London like rats. She would have told Claire that the narrative of the critical event in one’s past, the event from which all future unhappiness stems, is a Freudian construct that denies the complexities, the errancies, of human development, perceived time. Far from being reassuring, this would only have thrown Claire into further confusion. Was her mother really wise and enlightened? Was her past not really that bad?

He listened to Claire clumping away down the street until he couldn’t hear her any more, until he was fully alone with himself, and all the charged particles of anger began to fall and settle on the chairs, the table. He went to the bedroom and stripped the bed, pummelling the duvet, bundling the greasy sheets together then throwing them, hard, like a medicine ball, into the corner of the room. He knew he’d mishandled the situation. He’d admitted as much to Claire, but by then she was too far gone, too sunk in her bath of self-pity, to hear him.

It had begun that afternoon, when he’d suggested a walk up the coast. They hadn’t done anything like it all winter, but now the light was coming back, the daffodils were poking up, and he’d felt a need to escape the confines of the flat, which still seemed to harbour a faint smell of fatty lamb from the meal with Caro. In the back of his mind lay an unexamined plan to draw Claire out of her usual surroundings in order to draw her out of herself, allowing her to talk about subjects that were otherwise disbarred – the teacher, he’d hoped, and even, with luck, her mother.

It was a bright, cold, windy afternoon. Claire’s hair had been loose – she had not thought to bring a bobble – and when they got down on to the sands, the wind had whipped it around, the strands catching in her mouth, her eyes. People brought their dogs here to watch them race towards the horizon, ears flying, in pursuit of flung toys. A greyhound in a little red jacket, head down, had sprinted up to Claire, sniffed her crotch, then leapt away. She’d looked embarrassed, as if the dog had sensed something about her in particular, a distinctive, distracting smell.