‘If you carefully tip it up, just see what happens,’ Mattie had said, and he had tipped it and snow had fallen from nowhere, drifting like ash, a silent, delicate blizzard. He had never forgotten the wonder of it. And when the last flake had settled, he had tipped it again and somehow misjudged the weight, so that the globe had rolled over his hand and off the edge of the chair. The precise noise of it hitting the floor had never left him.

‘It was an accident and not in any way your fault,’ Mattie had said, consoling him with one of her enveloping hugs. ‘We should have opened it at the table, and I will make it my life’s purpose to hunt for another,’ though she hadn’t ever been able to find one exactly like it. But over the years there had been other astonishing presents – his own pair of binoculars in a leather case, a box of magic tricks, some of which had taken him weeks to master (‘Bravo! I shall henceforth call you the Great Noelini!’), an enormous illustrated atlas, with whales spouting in the South Atlantic, and Japan shaking cherry blossom across the Tsugaru Strait. One year there had been a tree so large that there was still a long, scraped mark on the drawing-room ceiling.

His narrow, rationed Christmases with Vee had been unremarkable by comparison, the gifts inevitably home-produced, the disasters limited to occasional power cuts and roast fowl of varying toughness. This year, Noel had modest hopes for the main course; he had found a recipe in a library book about the history of food preservation, and since the evening of the 23rd, the chicken had been steeping in brine, to which he’d added the peel from the single lemon allocated to Vee after a Sicilian shipment had resulted in a two-hour queue at the greengrocer’s. By the time he went to bed on Christmas Eve, he had already prepared the parsley and sausage-meat stuffing. The potatoes were washed, the carrots scrubbed and the ring of pink blancmange had set satisfactorily and was under a cover in the larder. Before switching off the light, he re-read the Christmas card he’d received from Genevieve Lumb, which she had signed with five ‘X’s. He remained a little troubled by the message, which mentioned that she was spending Christmas ‘with my cousins, Andrew, Lloyd and Alistair. Alistair has just won the South of England under-16s long-jump trophy, although, as you know, I don’t much care about sports.’

He woke abruptly, jaw clenched, from a vile and familiar dream of destruction. It was still dark. The alarm clock was ticking reassuringly, its luminous hands at twenty past four, but he could also hear what sounded like the tail end of an explosion, a low growl that, as he listened, resolved into the sulky mutter of a motor-car engine, and then stopped altogether. A door squealed, a door slammed; in the sudden silence he fell asleep again. He awoke a second time to see yellowish light oozing around the edge of the curtains, and he parted the folds to see a film of ice on the inside of the glass, and unbroken fog without. It was ten to eight. Time to take the chicken out of the brine.