‘The two Daves!’ I said, and they grinned self-consciously. ‘Big Dave and Mad Dave!’

A lot of people loved my father but Leo was especially loved by the boys who had worked for his building company in their youth. I knew that Big Dave had gone on to start his own building firm. I had no idea what had happened to Mad Dave but it was clear that he had not prospered. Whatever was wrong with him, or whatever he was taking, it was killing him.

Big Dave and Mad Dave!

I took their hands in mine, and they both blushed, like they were boys once more and we all laughed, apart from Big Dave’s wife, who smiled uncertainly, as if she was being left out of a private joke. Big Dave had the air of a man who had done very well for himself in a hard and demanding world and now he took control of the situation.

‘This is Tara,’ Big Dave said to his wife. ‘Leo’s girl. And this is Suze, Tara, my missus.’

There was a diamond the size of a walnut on Suze’s left-hand third finger.

‘You all right, Tara?’ Mad Dave said, and I realised how poleaxed I must have looked standing there reading the breaking news from James Caine.

I turned my smile up to ten. ‘Fine! Let’s go inside!’

I took their arms, feeling them flinch self-consciously, and I remembered the two Daves as teenage boys, already out in the working world for a couple of years at a time when I was starting to skip sixth form to watch bands, when cramming for A Levels was being replaced by staying out all night.

I remembered Big Dave was as tight-lipped as a Clint Eastwood cowboy, as if the world left him lost for words, or struck dumb by the powerful, extra-large frame that nature asked him to lug around, while Mad Dave was more confident and garrulous. But fifteen years ago both of them had blushed furiously at me from the passenger seat of my dad’s builder’s van as I came home from a night out and they waited for Leo on the drive, and they had stared at me with dumbstruck red faces on the nights when they had worked late on some building site and my father brought them to our dinner table to be fed by my mother. They were both tongue-tied in our big house and suspicious of sparkling mineral water and squirming with shy longing for me. The two Daves. It was a lot of fun at the time.

At least, it was for me.

I squeezed their arms now, touched that they had come to pay homage to my dad years after they had stopped working for him, and when we went inside, both my father and my mother greeted them like sons. The room was already crowded. A room above a pub was never going to be enough for my father’s sixtieth birthday.

Next to the stage, Christian and Marlon were watching the band set up. Christian was pointing at a Fender Telecaster sitting on its stand and explaining the provenance and importance of this guitar.