It was true. There really was no limit to the ways in which you could say the wrong thing to your children. You offered an olive branch and it was the wrong olive branch at the wrong time.

“Well?” Jamie asked again.

“To be honest, I’m trying to maintain a Buddhist detachment about the whole thing to stop it taking ten years off my life.”

“But she’s serious, yeh?”

“Your sister is serious about everything. Whether she’ll be serious about it in a fortnight’s time is anyone’s guess.”

“But what did she say?”

“Just that they were getting married. Your mother can fill you in on the emotional side of things. I’m afraid I was stuck talking to Ray.”

Jamie put a mug of tea down in front of George and raised his eyebrows. “Bet that was a white-knuckle thrill ride.”

And there it was, that little door, opening briefly.

They had never done the father-son stuff. A couple of Saturday afternoons at Silverstone racetrack. Putting up the garden shed together. That was about it.

On the other hand, he saw friends doing the father-son stuff and as far as he could see it amounted to little more than sitting in adjacent seats at rugby matches and sharing vulgar jokes. Mothers and daughters, that made sense. Dresses. Gossip. All in all, not doing the father-son stuff probably counted as a lucky escape.

Yet there were moments like this when he saw how alike he and Jamie were.

“Ray is, I confess, rather hard work,” said George. “In my long and sorry experience,” he dunked a biscuit, “trying to change your sister’s mind is a pointless exercise. I guess the game plan is to treat her like an adult. Keep a stiff upper lip. Be nice to Ray. If it all goes pear-shaped in two years’ time, well, we’ve had some practice in that department. The last thing I want to do is to let your sister know that we disapprove, then have Ray as a disgruntled son-in-law for the next thirty years.”

Jamie drank his tea. “I’m just…”

“What?”

“Nothing. You’re probably right. We should let her get on with it.”

Jean appeared in the doorway bearing a basket of dirty clothes. “Hello, Jamie. This is a nice surprise.”

“Hi, Mum.”

“Well, here’s your second opinion,” said George.

Jean put the basket on the washing machine. “About what?”

“Jamie was wondering whether we should save Katie from a reckless and inadvisable marriage.”

“Dad…” said Jamie tetchily.

And this was where Jamie and George parted company. Jamie couldn’t really do jokes, not at his own expense. He was, to be honest, a little delicate.

“George.” Jean glared at him accusingly. “What have you been saying?”

George refused to rise to the bait.

“I’m just worried about Katie,” said Jamie.

“We’re all worried about Katie,” said Jean, starting to fill the washing machine. “Ray wouldn’t be my first choice, either. But there you go. Your sister’s a woman who knows her own mind.”

Jamie stood up. “I’d better be going.”

Jean stopped filling the washing machine. “You’ve only just got here.”

“I know. I should have phoned, really. I just wanted to know what Katie had said. I’d better be heading off.”

And he was gone.

Jean turned to George. “Why do you always have to rub him up the wrong way?”

George bit his tongue. Again.

“Jamie?” Jean headed into the hallway.

George recalled only too well how much he had hated his own father. A friendly ogre who found coins in your ear and made origami squirrels and who shrank slowly over the years into an angry, drunken little man who thought praising children made them weak and never admitted that his own brother was schizophrenic, and who kept on shrinking so that by the time George and Judy and Brian were old enough to hold him to account he had performed the most impressive trick of all by turning into a self-pitying arthritic figure too insubstantial to be the butt of anyone’s anger.

Perhaps the best you could hope for was not to do the same thing to your own children.

Jamie was a good lad. Not the most robust of chaps. But they got on well enough.

Jean returned to the kitchen. “He’s gone. What was that all about?”

“Lord alone knows.” George stood up and dropped his empty mug into the sink. “The mystery of one’s children is never-ending.”

19

Jamie pulled into a layby at the edge of the village.

I think you should bring someone.

Christ. You avoided the subject for twenty years then it flashed past at eighty and vanished in a cloud of exhaust.

Had he been wrong about his father all along? Was it possible that he could’ve come out at sixteen and got no shit whatsoever? Totally understand. Chap at school. Keen on other chaps. Ended up playing cricket for Leicestershire.

Jamie was angry. Though it was hard to put a finger on precisely who he was angry with. Or why.

It was the same feeling he got every time he visited Peterborough. Every time he saw photographs of himself as a child. Every time he smelt plasticine or tasted fish fingers. He was nine again. Or twelve. Or fifteen. And it wasn’t about his feelings for Ivan Dunne. Or his lack of feelings for Charlie’s Angels. It was the sickening realization that he’d landed on the wrong planet. Or in the wrong family. Or in the wrong body. The realization that he had no choice but to bide his time until he could get away and build a little world of his own in which he felt safe.

It was Katie who pulled him through. Telling him to ignore Greg Pattershall’s gang. Saying graffiti only counted if it was spelt correctly. And she was right. They really did end up leading shitty little lives injecting heroin on some estate in Walton.

He was probably the only boy at school who’d learnt self-defense from his sister. He’d tried it once, on Mark Rice, who slumped into a bush and bled horribly, scaring Jamie so much he never hit anyone again.

Now he’d lost his sister. And no one understood. Not even Katie.

He wanted to sit in her kitchen and pull faces for Jacob and drink tea and eat too much Marks and Spencer date-and-walnut cake and…not even talk. Not even need to talk.

Fuck it. If he said the word home he was going to cry.

Maybe if he’d been better at staying in touch. Maybe if he’d eaten a little more date-and-walnut cake. If he’d invited her and Jacob over more often. If he’d lent her money…

This was pointless.

He turned the ignition on, pulled out of the layby and was nearly killed by a green Transit van.

20

Rain was coursing down the living-room window. Jean had gone into town an hour ago and George was about to head down the garden when a mass of black cloud hoved into view from the direction of Stamford and turned the lawn into a pond.

No matter. He would do some drawing.

It was not part of the plan. The plan was to finish the studio, then resurrect his dormant artistic skills. But there was no harm getting in a little practice beforehand.

He dug around in Jamie’s bedroom cupboard and unearthed a pad of watercolor paper from beneath the broken exercise bike. He found two serviceable pencils in the kitchen drawer and sharpened them in a rudimentary fashion with the steak knife.

He made a mug of tea, settled himself down at the dining table and wondered, instantly, why he had put this off for so long. The scent of shaved wood, the beaten-bronze texture of the cream paper. He remembered sitting in the corner of his bedroom at seven or eight with a pad on his knee, drawing convoluted Gothic castles with secret passages and mechanisms for pouring boiling oil over invaders. He could see the vines on the wallpaper and remember the beating he got for coloring them in with a ballpoint pen. He could feel the little patch of corduroy on his green trousers which he’d rubbed smooth and which his fingers still hunted for in stressful meetings twenty, thirty years later.