‘Where’ve I put what?’ Joan asked angrily, but she thought she knew what he meant. He meant Suzanne. Fine. If that was what they all wanted, Joan would find it. She ducked inside the cupboard and put the light on. The stacks of boxes, untouched for nearly twenty years, the cracked old suitcases and soft bags stuffed in between them, materialised. There were plenty of black bin bags, too, but when Joan started opening them they only held ancient yellowed duvets or underwhelming Halloween costumes, like the acre of torn-up sheets she’d once wound with a patience now unimaginable around Richard’s pyjama’d limbs. Maybe she should stay in the cupboard, with the things she remembered ranged solidly around her, until whatever was happening came to an end.

‘The food’s getting cold,’ Henry called.

Suzanne was not in any of the bags. Despairing, she opened a box, and saw her mother’s cutlery. She opened another and it was full of crumpled yellow newspaper with nestled inside it three of the Toby jugs. Their faces stared up at her, rigid and rosy with gin. The central jug was the one she reached for. This, unusually, was a woman: a stout, matronly figure with bloated cheeks and a dark blue tricorne hat, out of which – had you used the jug as a jug, which Joan’s mother never did – the liquid would have poured. There had only been two women in her mother’s collection. The rest of them, twenty-five or so, had been middle-aged men, some drinking, some with pipes or snuff, all squatting in the glass-fronted cabinet that dominated the dining room, their bulbous glazed chins and bellies shining. The blue woman had been the only jug that had ever appealed to Joan, though she couldn’t say she’d liked her. It was more of a fascinated fear.

She picked her up and marched her back to Henry. ‘There. Is this what you want?’

Henry smiled – he almost looked relieved. ‘All right. Let’s go.’

The sweetish smell of Chinese food struck her as she passed through the door. There they all were, arranged around the kitchen table like a family photograph just waiting to be taken: Federico with his alligator, Richard with a carved wooden knickerbockered boy, Tessa with her rotten animate compost heap shedding dark filaments on to the floor, Neal – since when had Neal arrived? – with a faceless lump like a cricket sock packed with dough, and Claire, terrible Claire, her face inside the raised hood of the black cagoule still swollen from crying, holding up the buoyant dome of Suzanne’s head, its rice-cake-rubbled surface. One of the goggly eyes had fallen off, but the other adhered and swivelled, looking at Joan with old dislike.