When he went to the grammar school he no longer passed Moorhouse’s, because he took the train, with James and Luke. There was a bus, but the train was faster. Six years of grammar school had prepared him for two years of college and then various clerical jobs, hopping from an estate agent’s to an accountancy firm, from which he’d moved to the county council. There he had served the people. There he had proved, over time, to be grossly incompetent in that service – so incompetent that he could not be helped, even after fourteen years of slow, inefficient and finally destructive non-service. He was approaching fifty, and the human-resources manager – Jo, or Jean – had sat with him and his union rep because things had finally come to a head. Things couldn’t go on the way they were going, and for his own protection, for his own health… what she wanted to do was protect him from the pressure, as if he was being brought back from a war. It was as if the conflict had proved too much and he was too shell-shocked to perform his duties.

No hospital bed behind the lines, though.

No bandages round his head, and no pretty nurse to tell him he was through the worst of it as she put bluebells into the flower vase. No relationship forming slowly, for they were both shy, and had suffered so much.

‘Hold me.’

His mother had said that, and there’d been no nurse at all, sadly, and his GP had always struck him as rather abrupt. Some people were abrupt, out of shyness. If you’re shy, you develop strategies to conceal it – you learn to be rude and brisk, and Dr Bonnermorgan had so many patients who were genuinely, visibly sick… his waiting room was full of them. There were five doctors in all, and every one of them saw steady streams of people with diabetes and arthritic complications – there were so many ways of being diagnosably, properly ill. Michael had sat opposite a man with a huge dressing over his eye, whilst a young woman had a wheezing baby that seemed too sick to even cry. The baby had to take priority – there was nothing more heartbreaking than a baby with an illness. Michael would have been abrupt too, if anyone had come between him and a dying child, so he had nothing but sympathy for Dr Bonnermorgan’s shy aggression and his natural disgust for malingering charlatans who needed to shake themselves awake and stop fantasising about bluebells.

‘What can we do for you this time?’

The doctor had a beard. It was neat on his face, so carefully trimmed – but the question asked was so freighted with uninterest and suspicion that Michael could hardly reply.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘It’s probably nothing.’

Had he laughed? Yes.