Deep breaths, Georgina, I tell myself. Like Fay said.

‘He stood and took it all. He couldn’t do anything else. I avoided him for the rest of the weekend, and went back to Newcastle. In pieces.’

Another deep breath.

‘He calls me, a day later, conciliatory, and offered to drive up to Newcastle to see me. I told him to piss off.’

Just as I think I’ve got through this, I break. I break completely on the words piss off. I put my face in my hands and my shoulders shake as I weep. This is kept in a safely locked box most of the time, and I try to mislay the key. Sometimes when I open it, the contents feel like they could consume me.

Moments later, I feel Lucas crouching next to me. He puts his arm around me, and without thinking I turn and sob into his shoulder. The fabric smells of him, in a nice way. He is bigger and broader than the boy I was heavy petting with in the park. I wish I could lose myself into this embrace, and not only because of who he is and what he was to me. It feels so good to have someone hold me. It eases this immovable pain in my chest.

‘Sorry,’ I say, voice gone up three octaves due to crying at same time. ‘Sorry. You were talking about your wife and now I’m booing …’

‘Hey hey hey. It’s fine, it’s alright to cry,’ Lucas shushes me and rubs my back. Keith lets out a confused whimper and it makes us both laugh. Lucas fetches tissues and I accept one. Much as I didn’t want to cry in front of Lucas, I feel better for having done it.

Lucas sits down in his seat again. I crumple the tissue in both hands.

‘And he—’ I breathe, deeply, ‘—he died, a few weeks later. Giant heart attack. We’d never made up. That was it. “Piss off” was the last time we spoke.’

I sniff and gasp.

Lucas gasps too, in a different way. ‘Oh. No.’

‘I never told Mum or my sister about our fight, how could I? We’re burying Dad twenty-five years before we expected to, oh and by the way he was playing away, not sure with who, good luck processing this information.’ I shrug: ‘And Dad wasn’t there to defend himself. So when you couldn’t tell everyone you and Niamh weren’t together, or you felt let down by her? I get that. I couldn’t tell everyone I was the apple of my dad’s eye and he mine but my last memory is us at daggers drawn, or me hanging up on him.’

Tears crawl down my face and I wipe them with my sleeve.

‘Ah,’ Lucas looks down, and brushes a tear away himself.

‘There’s a post-credits sequence too,’ I say, picking up my whisky. ‘I was so traumatised, I had a panic attack in my end of first year exams and never went back to university. It was Dad who really wanted me to get that degree. Even now I flinch when I see photos of people in their mortar boards, Mum and Dad either side. I had been so sure that was something I’d have. Wrong again.’

‘This is so brutal. I’m so sorry.’

We sit and listen to Keith snoring.

‘You said you and your dad were close, right?’ Lucas says.

‘Yes.’

‘Then your dad knew you loved him. And he loved you. Tell me this, if he were here, if he could have another five minutes, what would he be saying to you? Would he be saying – “I can’t believe you were mad at me last time I saw you?”

I think about it, and shake my head.

‘No, exactly. He’d be saying, I’m so sorry I let you down at the end. But you don’t need his apology. And he wouldn’t need yours.’

This is so insightful and sensitive that I barely have words.

‘Thank you,’ I say. ‘Thank you so much for saying that.’

Lucas looks at me intently.

‘This happened when you were eighteen?’ he asks.

‘Yeah. Eighteen. My first term at university, the winter.’

At first, I could swear that the age lands as significant to him. And just as quickly, the suspicion passes, and I think: wait, was that not a flicker of recognition? But someone straining, trying to place you because you’ve attained a new significance?

‘A few months after we finished sixth form,’ I say, chancing my arm.

‘That’s a tough age to have the rug pulled from under you,’ Lucas says.

‘So much so. You barely know who you are yourself, you need your parents to carry on being themselves.’

‘Sure. I don’t think I knew who I was or anyone else was until about twenty-five. Kind of nice, that innocence, in retrospect.’

Are we speaking in code?

‘Oh, speaking of cheating men,’ I say, to move things on more than a desire to discuss it, ‘You were right about Robin. He ran into my parents in a supermarket and did a number on them about his devotion to me. It means he already knew I was working here when he came in.’

‘Jesus. I can’t say I’m surprised though.’

‘Do you know, I’d assumed it was chance he met my parents and he’d not be staking Waitrose out, and right as I’m telling you, I’m not so sure.’ I pause. ‘He thinks he can do things in name of this love for me, which is fictional horseshit.’

Lucas says: ‘Georgina. It might not be true, but be careful. Something I’ve learned is people do much worse things to you in the name of love, than they ever do as your enemy.’

On my journey home, dark streets scrolling past my window, I turn these words over and over until I am not sure if I am imagining a look of total understanding that passed between us as he uttered them. Something shifted between Lucas and me tonight, I’m just not quite sure what.

30

The resolution with Geoffrey is a non-resolution, an impasse, rather than a truce – he won’t apologise, I won’t apologise.

I’d be quite happy never to see the Tizer-haired old walrus as long as I live, but it’s problematic if I want any sort of relationship with my mum. And that weekend, a social occasion comes up where I have to choose if I’m going to boycott: Esther’s Sunday lunch.

I wrestled with various evasions or outright refusals and then thought, why should he get to still go to things like that, while I behave like the outcast? Sod him.

Esther suggests I arrive half an hour before official kick-off so that it’s my feet under her dining room table when they arrive, as a symbolic gesture, and I gratefully do as I’m told.

Unfortunately, both of us forget Geoffrey is the sort of nightmare guest who thinks turning up forty-five minutes before he’s been invited is an act of conspicuous efficiency, as opposed to wildly inconsiderate. His shiny new reg Volvo is squatting on the drive like Mr Toad’s chariot when the taxi drops me off.

It irks me so much that Mum is a passenger in this, both literally and figuratively. I hope I’m never in a marriage where I don’t feel I can say: No we’re not setting off an hour early so our hostess has to grit her teeth and miss the shower she’d planned, sit back down.

‘Hi,’ I say, in the living room doorway, as Milo singsongs, ‘Hiiiiiii, Auntie Georgina,’ back.

Geoffrey sullenly throws his cava down his throat without looking at me or speaking, while Mum and Mark say hello.

An unusually antsy Esther bustles off to get me a cava and I sit down. Mark says: ‘How’re tricks?’ and we make small talk. I can see Mum’s mind whirring as she tries to find a topic that is both relevant to the company and totally neutral.

I could tell her, from my time with Robin, that if your partner makes your social life much harder for you, you might have picked the wrong partner.

‘Here she is, right on time! Look at that, Esther,’ Mark says, standing up, as a mobility adapted van sweeps into the drive.

‘It’s a miracle, the care home must be on fire,’ Esther says, as Nana Hogg emerges on to the gravel. With much fanfare and exertion – by others – she’s put in a wheelchair and conveyed into the house. She announces her preference to be on the sofa, which displaces a clearly displeased Geoffrey, much to my delight. She gets her knitting out, mauve hedgehogs of soft yarn, and starts clacking away with the needles.

Mark says to me: ‘That’s a lovely idea about taking flowers to your dad’s grave on his birthday with Milo, by the way. I’ve got time off and I think Esther can take leave too?’

‘Yep. The teachers say Milo can have the day off school,’ she says.

‘Patsy and Geoff, you’re very welcome to join. We’re thinking of heading there for one, and having a spot of lunch after?’

Mark’s guileless decency is actually a fiendish weapon here. If I was saying this, it would have side to it. Mark is genuine. It makes Geoffrey look all the worse.

‘Hnph,’ Geoffrey says.

‘I’m sure we can come along,’ Mum says, embarrassed.

‘Why?’ Geoffrey says, rankled.

I’m bug eyed. Is he really going to be a git about this, with an audience? This is unexpected. He’s so furious about me, he’s not able to do the greasy backhanded routine. It’s war.

‘It would’ve been his sixty-fifth birthday,’ Mum says.

‘He’s not there though, is he.’

An awkward, shocked silence, soundtracked only by the clink as an on-edge Esther totters around, refilling glasses.

‘In the sense he’s not going to rise up out of the ground and start offering us carrot cake?’ I say to Geoffrey, the first moment we’ve spoken. He looks suitably revolted that I’ve dared. ‘This is a blow, I had no idea.’