If they hadn’t made me the girl’s godfather, and weren’t as a family so comfortable to be around, I think I would have said something by now, and hang the consequences. Given my mum, and what she did to herself, it is essential that they know. But I am Agnes’s godfather, I play with her almost every other weekend, and she has come to matter to me in ways I could not have predicted. Once I tell Hanna and Mick that I think Agnes is mine, then I will lose her, if not forever, if not entirely, then for a long time, and there will always be this cloud over us. This is a sacrifice I know I must make, but frankly I haven’t the guts.

At the door, as I’m saying goodbye, girding myself for the drive back to the city, Hanna says, ‘I’ve never understood why you and Mick are so hostile towards Poppy.’

Poppy? Poppy. How old must she be now? Well into her seventies, I would have thought. I haven’t thought about Poppy in years, and when I have, it’s always been with affection, or at any rate, with amusement. ‘I think “hostile” is a bit strong.’

‘No,’ Hanna says, ‘it isn’t.’

‘Well. You probably had to be there. Good night.’

‘Good night, Connie.’

I lean in for a kiss but she has already turned away; she is closing the door on me.

ELEVEN

‘Come on, Connie,’ Dad called, swinging my bedroom door open. Since about half-past six he had been trying to rouse me. He was leaving early. He had a conference to attend, a presentation to give. Something very last-minute and, by the sound of it, important. He was stressed. ‘Are you at cricket practice this evening?’

Groaning, I pulled the duvet over my head.

He stepped into my room. ‘There isn’t time for me to give you a lift into school.’

I flung the duvet off and sat up. ‘Shit.’

‘Conrad.’

‘Sorry.’

‘You’re just going to have to lug everything in yourself.’

Usually, when there was an evening practice, Dad gave me a lift to school in the car. Getting there on foot was not easy, given the sheer amount of kit I had to carry. I had my own bat, my own pads, my own gloves – last year’s unlooked-for birthday present.

‘No problem,’ I said.

‘I’m sorry, Conrad.’

‘S’okay.’

‘I’m sorry.’ For one horrible moment it looked as though he was going to hug me.

‘Dad, it’s okay. Just let me get dressed, yes?’

He remembered himself. He forced a smile. ‘What do you want for breakfast?’

‘Eggs?’

‘Sure.’

Dad clattered around in the kitchen while, piece by piece, I assembled myself. Textbooks, uniform, kit. Bits of sleep-deprived brain.

Dad called up the stairs, ‘Have you got everything?’

‘Everything but the kitchen bloody sink.’ It was embarrassing, striding onto the school cricket pitch in such brand-new gear. It must have cost my parents a small fortune.

‘Jumper?’

‘In this weather?’

‘Jumper.’

‘Okay, Dad.’

I threw the whole lot into a leather-handled green canvas bag that, by disregarding a hundred years of innovation in man-made textiles, was an embarrassment in itself.

I lugged the bag downstairs. The key was hung up as usual by the side door. Dad kept our car parked among all the others out the front of the hotel. I went out with my bag. I was still dozy, running on habit, and it wasn’t until I turned the key to open the boot that I remembered I wasn’t getting a lift. Before I could catch the boot lid it swung up on its spring.

Mum lay curled up inside, barefoot, in denim shorts and one of Dad’s cast-off jumpers. The chalk-white shapelessness of her legs made it clear to me, straight away, that she was dead.

My eyes drank in strange details – hairs on her calves; her rough, blotched knees – as though death were an extreme form of bodily neglect. Her face, blue and swollen and bovine, was only partly visible through the fog that had collected on the inside of the bag. She’d taped it around her throat with brown tape. It was one of our big freezer bags from the kitchen. Near where her eyeball had stuck to the plastic there was a white patch, a writable surface, ‘BEST BEFORE’ in clear cut-away type. Her bottom teeth were visible. They were very small.

‘Conrad!’

I dropped my bag and turned.

Dad stood at the entrance to the hotel. He had an apron tied around his middle, protecting his suit. A spatula in his hand.

Things slowed down around me, or seemed to, driven out of mind by the clatter inside my own head. It felt, for a moment, as if I hung outside myself, watching myself thinking.

Mum in the boot – whose doing was this? Mum’s own. The bag around her head was sign enough of that. The stench of whisky and bleach. For years, and wordlessly, Dad and I had been living in anticipation of this moment. Batting it away. Facing it down. All for nothing. Here it was at last.

But this was not what was supposed to happen. It was supposed to be Dad who had found her like this. Dad, called away at short notice on a last-minute trip!

I had opened the boot instead. I had discovered her. ‘Dad?’

He just stood there in the shade of the portico, shoulders raised in a half-shrug. Nonplussed.

Who had invited Dad to this last-minute conference? Was the conference even real? Mum had planned this. She had expected Dad to find her here as he got ready to go, filling the boot with vests and goggles and all the rest of his visual paraphernalia. It hadn’t been enough that she had decided to destroy herself at last. She had wanted to destroy Dad, too. She still could.

All right.

I turned.

Dad had gone back inside.

It was clear enough what I had to do. I had to go back inside and find him. Warn him. Tell him. At least if I told him what she had done, then he would be prepared. Seeing her there, dumped like a deer in the back of a poacher’s car, would no longer be the killer shock that Mum had meant it to be.

The trouble was, I didn’t know if I could tell him. I didn’t know if I had the strength to go back into the hotel and catch him as he came out through the lobby, asking for his car keys.

And what if I did tell him? What then? Dad runs pell-mell to the car, to see the thing his wife has made of herself, and he sinks to his knees in the car park; or he hugs me, hugs me like he hugged me when we drove back from hospital, hugs me and trembles and fails and falls apart in my hands the way he did before, and across the road the estate just goes on and on and on, its roofs a burial ground of red pyramids—

Dad was back in the kitchen, cooking bacon and eggs. He had his back to me, shoulders hunched as he nudged food around the pan. The pressure was back on him again. When Mum left for the protest camp, there were always a couple of days of decompression, and Dad brightened. Soon enough, though, he was fretting over her absence just as much as he had been fretting in her presence. How was she? What was she up to? Was she well? Was she safe?

Now I would have to rob him of that and lay upon him something new – a burden unimaginably heavier than the one he was used to. ‘Dad.’

‘I told you I couldn’t give you a lift to school.’

‘I know, Dad.’

‘I told you.’

‘Yes, Dad. I’m sorry.’

He clattered a couple of dishes out of the Welsh dresser. ‘What are we going to do?’

‘I’ll go get my kit.’ I stood up.

‘No!’ He stared at me. ‘I’ll drive you in.’

‘You don’t have time.’

‘I’ll drive you in.’

‘Yes?’

‘What time does your practice end this evening?’

‘Six. Quarter to six,’ I said, ‘I think. Dad.’

‘Okay, I can pick you up on my way home. Now, have you got everything?’

‘Yes.’

‘Here you are.’ He shuffled from the counter to the table, put down my plate, and moved away.

‘Dad.’

‘Uh-huh?’ He was stacking the dishwasher now. He was pottering about the room, still with his back to me.