I smiled reflexively. ‘They practically had to condemn it after we moved out. We were disgusting. Except for you.’ It was Bill who’d kept that kitchen and bathroom tidy in our shared house during second year, the only one who’d actually learned that you had to clean up after yourself as an adult. The rest of us filled it with burnt pans and ashtrays and pants drying to a crisp on radiators. ‘Is Cassie OK?’ She had flitted out of the room as I came in, as if driven away by my presence.

He was stacking the plates from the garden by the sink. ‘She’s very quiet. In shock, maybe. There were a few phone calls – I think her school friends, though they sounded more confident than most adults I know. She wouldn’t take them. Not answering her mobile either.’

‘They all are at that school. I didn’t want her going there, but . . . well, Mike thought the comp wasn’t good enough. It had terrible results.’ I sat down at the table, enjoying how scrubbed and clean it was. Even the floor had been washed. I looked but the blood spot was still there, a small indelible stain. ‘Don’t you wish we’d had that kind of confidence? God, I was such a little mouse at Oxford. I wasted all those opportunities.’

‘You wouldn’t have been you if you’d been confident. Not that kind of confident, anyway.’ He paused for a moment, rinsing plates. ‘I saw you on TV, you know. I streamed it.’

‘Oh.’

‘You were brilliant. You took him apart, but not like you were angry or irrational or any of those things people say about feminists. Like you were his mum telling him off or something.’

‘That’s how I tried to imagine it. What I’d do if Benji comes home in a few years’ time and starts with this sexist crap they all seem to pick up. Where do they get it from?’

‘The internet, I imagine. It wasn’t like that for me growing up in Leeds. I only got what my mum told me. You remember her?’

‘Of course. Amazing woman.’ Bill’s mother had raised him alone after his father died, despite barely speaking the language.

‘Yeah. She liked you.’

I was remembering that Bill’s mother had died a few years ago. I hadn’t gone to the funeral. We were barely in touch then, which had been the case for the past twenty or so years, until he sent that email to us all a few months back, saying he was coming home, he and Astrid were over, and I’d had my bright idea. A reunion. Twenty-five years. If only I’d known. I should have gone to the funeral anyway. ‘I’m sorry, Bill. It must have been hard.’