Joan remembered the struggle to decide what to keep from her own mother’s house. The glass bead necklaces, heavy, like strings of marbles. The ugly squadron of Toby jugs. But that had been unavoidable. Her mother had been dead, a stroke at seventy-six – would Claire even remember? – and Joan’s brothers were worse than useless at practical things, so she’d left Henry with the kids and done it herself in one weekend. And those had been her mother’s things, not Joan’s. She wondered for a moment where her own schoolbooks were, and found that she didn’t know. She and Henry had a deep cupboard in their room, too, full of old suitcases, and curtains too short for this house’s windows, and the boxed-up Toby jugs. Perhaps she would look for them later.

Mark dumped another bag in the car. When he’d powered back upstairs, Joan ventured out across the gravel and looked into the open boot. The bags lay slumped heavily across one another. Their twisted ends wrinkled and breathed. One was untied: she plunged her hand in, a lucky dip, grabbed the spine of something, and pulled it out. She’d been hoping for a schoolbook – something full of Claire’s sweet round handwriting from before she forcibly changed it, age fourteen, to a spiky mess – but it was a programme: Muster’s Puppets presents … A Journey Round the Moon.