Always the cuppa. But I agreed, and as she filled the kettle she said, ‘It’s not gone.’

‘No?’

She reached up to the bill box, opened it and produced the yellowing photo. ‘You keep it.’

‘But why …?’

She shovelled tea into the pot. ‘I’m the one who keeps the peace.’

I waited.

‘Your mother, sitting there, and she says, Clem’s been looking at that photo in the hall. What was I gonna say?’

I studied the fat face, the brown eyes, the black hair that burst out of his head, down his cheeks; the small lips and little dent in his chin that, I supposed, I’d inherit.

‘Put it in a book,’ Val said. ‘Somewhere she won’t find it.’

‘She can’t tell you what to do.’

But she just filled the pot with hot water, sat and waited. ‘She was adamant. Said you’d been asking questions, and it was best you didn’t know.’

‘Why?’

‘You can’t unknow things, can you? Then you’ve got seventy years of it.’

She said this like she knew it better than anyone.

‘That’s all your mum’s thinking. It wasn’t that he was a horror.’

She poured the tea, silent. With Val, silence only meant one thing. She was deciding. Then she touched the photo and said, ‘In a book, or under a cupboard?’

Tea, hot, brown and photographic, like all the tea she’d ever poured, and drunk, all the days, the ticking Tower of London on the wall. Then she said, ‘Firstly, he built that house, and he did a pretty good job.’

‘I knew that,’ I said, as a way of telling her she’d have to start the story closer to the end.

‘We all helped where we could, whether it was painting, or planting the garden. Until it was real decent-looking and your mum, and dad, they were happy.’

I settled in for the tea.

‘Then came Jen, and you, and he was the proudest dad alive. He, he was the one who’d walk you … around the block, stopping to show everyone. You, especially, cos you were the blondie, with the blue eyes, and handsome … still are, eh?’ She stopped to think. ‘It’s not my place to tell you.’

‘I’ll never say.’

She had to be sure I’d put this, too, under my wardrobe. ‘Whatever anyone might say about him, he was a hard worker, at the start at least. He laid bricks.’

‘A bricklayer?’

‘For about year. Bit longer. Up at six, off on his motorbike.’

I’d seen the handlebars hanging from the shed roof.

‘Home at four. Did his back in, but kept at it. Hated it, but kept at it. He had these babies, and wanted to support them. That’s what he was like, no matter what anyone says, he wanted to do the right thing.’

It sounded hopeful. Bricklaying. You’d have to be determined. Building other people’s houses. People who could afford to build in brick.

‘Maybe that’s all you need to know,’ she said.