‘You’ve changed the cupboards,’ Claire said. Her voice had an accusatory note that Joan immediately remembered.

‘Would you like to sit down?’

‘We’ve been scrunched in the car for an hour.’

Joan stopped herself asking where they’d driven from, why it had taken an hour. Last she knew, Claire had been living in a shared house in Radcliffe, but that was ten months ago. It all could’ve changed.

‘So, Mark,’ Henry ventured, ‘what is it you do?’

Mark nodded, without surprise, as if he’d been waiting for this question. ‘I coach people, Henry,’ he said.

‘Rugby? Boxing?’

‘I’m a life coach, actually. So a little bit of fitness, yeah, but it’s more than that.’

Joan could tell that Henry didn’t know what life coaching was. Joan did. She’d thought about trying it herself, and now she was glad she never had. She asked, ‘Is that how you met?’

‘I’m not paying him,’ Claire said, instantly, ‘if that’s what you mean.’

‘It was a meet-up,’ Mark said, and now it was Joan’s turn to be confused. He could see it, and began to smile. He explained that he did a lot of stuff online. People watched, they commented and joined in. He coached online, too. (That made sense. Claire had spent thousands of hours online when she’d lived at home. They’d had to switch the hub off to get her to bed.) Sometimes he did a random meet-up somewhere, getting face-to-face with the fans. He appeared to say ‘fans’ without irony. Perhaps Joan wasn’t attuned to his tone yet. Or perhaps he was actually famous, what passed for famous these days. Claire came along to one of the meet-ups, Mark continued. They hit it off straight away. They went for a drink, didn’t they? The rest is history, he said, though it was news to Joan, and delivered too easily, too directly, without any of the nerves you’d expect from a boyfriend meeting the parents for the first time. That was his age, she supposed. He might be closer to Henry’s than he was to Claire’s.

‘And you enjoy it,’ Henry asked, ‘this coaching?’

‘People transforming their lives? What could be better than that?’ Mark’s spread hands were casual, but his tone was unappealingly serious. Not that different from Claire’s other boyfriends, then. She’d always gone for men who couldn’t laugh at themselves.

‘It’s all about transformations these days, isn’t it?’ Joan said. ‘Makeovers and things. Getting rid of all your possessions. Moving to Australia. Maybe that’s what we need to do. Maybe we need to sell up and move to Australia.’