Otherwise, nothing ever changed in our house. I’d noticed it before, but I noticed it especially that evening, when I was standing at the kitchen sink emptying cold dregs from a teapot that we seemed to have been using—in all its brown, chipped ugliness—since the year dot. I stood it next to the kettle and tried not to feel panicked as I scanned the room in search of anything that might be described as new, or newish. Everything seemed so inevitable. The enamel bread bin, the threadbare ironing board, the poky table with the Formica top. The fridge magnets Stella and I had collected with tokens from a Shreddies box. The Kings and Queens of England poster still stuck to the wall, by some miracle, on flinty shards of Blu-Tack. Even the Christmas cactus on the windowsill. Everything the same as ever and ever, only a little more dust caked, or ropy, or dried up. I pressed my hands against my cheeks, testing them for deterioration. What would it mean, I wondered, to throw everything out and start again? Would it feel like a joyful rebirth? Or would it be like pulling the skin away from our flesh—Dad’s and mine—strip by agonising strip?

A tentative knock on the back door made me jump, but the blurry figure in the frosted glass was unmistakably Tom. I glanced at the clock. It was gone eleven and our house was not, by any stretch of the imagination, en route to his flat.

“Tom?” I opened the door a couple of inches. “What are you doing?”

He must have stumbled along the back lane, where everyone kept their bins, and made his way into our garden. I was conscious of a younger, sweeter Freya for whom this scenario would have been unbearably thrilling. Rather as she would have done, I crossed the kitchen and closed the door into the hall, so that Dad couldn’t hear us.

“Sorry.” Tom lingered outside. “It’s just, I need to speak to you. I tried to catch you as you were leaving the gallery, but I got waylaid.”

The kettle was rumbling to a boil.

“I’m just making Dad some tea . . .”

He pushed the door open and held out his hand, inviting me into the night.

“I won’t keep you a minute,” he said. “I don’t want to start nattering with your dad right now. . . . It’s you . . .”

Our back garden was a sparse strip of grass and uneven paving, ending in a fence. It was too dark to see anything except a few sketchy shapes and a handful of lighted windows in the houses opposite, but in my mind’s eye I saw the row of identikit terraces beyond them, and the next and the next and the next, all the way up the hill to the main road. Tom and I walked side by side to the end of the path, and halfway back again, to the edge of the square of light that fell from the kitchen window.