He would smile, perhaps relieved by my unaffectedness. Sometimes Yasmeen cried. I thought two crying daughters would be too much for him, so I trained myself to wait until I was alone, in my closet or in the bath. My father would wipe Yasmeen’s face, hug us both, ask us if we wanted chocolate milk.

“Good girl,” he’d whisper in my ear. I was good because I was restrained. My father, I believe, carried a lot of hurt from his relationship with my mother. He did not like to see the related pain radiating from his daughters’ eyes.

Those letters taught me about longing. Reading them in front of my father taught me to hide it, often even from myself. I know now what a dangerous kind of denial that is. It leaves you ravenous. It makes your seismometer vibrate when the phone call you are shocked to discover you have been waiting for your whole life offers you precisely what you are terrified to want: Hello, Nadia. This is your mama.

It was, to him, an encounter of sudden intimacy in this public place; the angle of her head, her posture, her hands. He watched as a man – soused and staggering, every careful step an acknowledgement of the spinning earth and its axial tilt – fell into the vacant chair opposite her, giving Helena a slow, marinated gaze until his head fell, weighty as a curling stone, and slid across the table. John and another onlooker jumped up to help at the same time and, between them, dragged the man to the back of the pub to sleep it off.

If they hadn’t happened to meet in the two months, out of a lifetime, when he was idling, they’d never have got together. It was practically false pretences. She didn’t know why he even wanted it. Just for shags and someone to have around when Roland was busy? That unfair thought brought out its own contradiction: she knew why he wanted this. It was the same reason he was so attentive to what she thought of him. They’d never spoken about it, but every page of his personality was watermarked with the memory of loneliness. That made her feel for him. And he was good. There was no doubt he was good. And maybe, in fact, when you thought about it like a grown-up, that need in him, and that goodness, were forces powerful enough to keep a relationship impregnable for decades. It was like when you were hiring: drive was more important than qualifications. You wanted them hungry. They would become what you needed.

James was suddenly, utterly, exhausted. He should have foreseen this. Everyone loved Roland. James loved him. For the first time since their trip to Lochnagar in the purple Lamborghini, he felt himself to be alone in the world. Nothing had changed since he was a teenager. He hadn’t, after all, left himself behind. Slowly, he reasoned his way through the matter at hand. Perhaps if he’d been less reasonable, he’d still have her. “Well, if Alice and me didn’t match up, that doesn’t mean you and her shouldn’t try. It’s a question of compatibility not… possession. It’s not like I’ve got any claims on her.”

It was as if something in him cracked open. In his mind’s eye, he saw the same scene another generation back: his mum as pink smudge, being held by a nana far younger than he was now. And then the baby nana being held by great-grandma, and so on, back and back through the millennia. It was like the regular ticking of a clock and each tick a human generation. He understood, so abruptly it hurt, that he was not, as he’d always assumed, an individual. He was like one of Mendel’s peas in GCSE biology, just one of a row of seedlings in which the inherited traits – a nose, a talent, a sense of humour – were recombined and passed forward again. He was like a fish who’d always believed he moved for his own reasons but now realised he was just one iridescent shimmer in the shoal.