‘Edna’s ripping you off,’ Christopher said.

‘Yes. Spend some more money, Lex.’

‘I don’t mind it,’ I said. ‘I’ve got used to it. She’s very quiet. I’m never even there.’

‘Leave Edna, and come back to London.’

‘Well, I’m here now.’

‘And you have to stay for my birthday,’ Olivia said. ‘It’s the big one. Twenty-eight. I’m having the party two years early, before I’m too tired.’

‘I’m exhausted,’ I said.

‘New York was a good excuse, but that isn’t.’

The bartender collected the glasses. ‘Which one did you like?’ he asked. There had been tasting notes, but we hadn’t read them.

‘I liked them all,’ Olivia said, ‘and this one the best.’

‘What about JP?’ Christopher asked.

‘What about him?’

Christopher looked at Olivia, a drink beyond subtlety.

‘Will you see him?’

‘I don’t think there’ll be time,’ I said. ‘I’m working for a psychopath.’

‘He asks about you whenever I have to see him,’ Olivia said.

‘That’s nice.’

‘I say that you’re doing great. I say that you’re beautiful and rich.’

‘Thanks, Liv. To be honest, I don’t think about him too much. Just on and off. I’m OK.’

‘If there’s anything you’d like to know, I can find it out.’

‘Well, I’d like very much not to talk about it.’

We tried to get into Ronnie Scott’s for the later show, but there wasn’t one on Sundays, and the club was about to close. ‘Go home,’ the doorman suggested. Christopher needed to meet his boyfriend; the stand-up hadn’t gone well. I implored Olivia to join me for one final drink.

‘Twelve fifteen,’ she said, and recoiled from her watch. ‘I’m out, Lex. I’m out.’

When her taxi arrived, she climbed in and lay down on the back seat, and looked at me upside down, through the open window.

‘It’s too hot for any of this,’ she said, and then, laughing: ‘Is it really Sunday?’

‘It’s the new Thursday.’

‘So long. So long, my friend.’

The driver, bored with us, began to pull out. Olivia sat up and waved. ‘London!’ she shouted. ‘Isn’t it wonderful?’ I nodded: yes, yes, it was good to be in the city. The taxi trundled into the night traffic. I stood on the kerb for a few minutes, considering a man I used to see in Marylebone, after JP. Only a short walk away. I had met him online according to his discretion, and I thought of him often, when I was listless in New York. It was a terrible idea. For all I knew, he could be married now.

I walked past the dark restaurants and the doorways, and back to the hotel. There was a freestanding bath in the middle of my room, which I hadn’t bothered to run during the week. Now I sat on the chequered floor and watched it filling. When I was swaddled in the water, I reached for my phone. Ethan had messaged. Wesley won the cricket game. It was good to see you, as ever. A transmission from a whole different time. I squinted at the screen. Excellent news, I replied. Then, because I was soft and drunk: Honduras?

One last task for the day. I found the number I was looking for, and again there was the breathless voicemail, as though you had interrupted her in tears, or in bed. ‘Delilah,’ I said. ‘Why don’t you ring me the fuck back.’

Mother was finally examined more than a week after Ethan’s birth. In the first few days, jubilant with the baby, the pain had felt like an accomplishment. On the seventh day, she was cowed by fever, and she prayed with her eyes on Father, imploring. He relented when Ethan was ten days old, and Mother was shaking too hard to hold him. She hadn’t prayed hard enough.

After the infections were treated, and the tears stitched, the doctor informed my parents that if Mother decided to have more children, there was a significant risk of complications, and she should do so only in a hospital bed. The doctor must have been the kind of man whom Father tolerated: powerful; self-assured; difficult to argue with. I was too young to remember Delilah’s birth, but I recall our visit to hospital to meet Evie, who was born late on New Year’s Day.

Father had left us with Mother’s sister, Peggy, who had married one of the boys from the grammar school. She was pregnant at the wedding, although she tied a great bow of chiffon low around her waist, and nobody was allowed to talk about it until the couple returned from honeymoon. By the time Evie was born, Peggy had two loud, gormless boys, one Ethan’s age and the other a little older, and spent her days cleaning the new home her husband had purchased. Tony Granger was an estate agent in Manchester, and seldom seen. Ethan called him the Faceless Man: we only ever seemed to catch a glimpse of navy suit or polished shoes, disappearing into one of the rooms of the vast, white house.

Ethan liked to torture our cousins, the way that some children like to torture the household pet. He told them fanciful stories: if they could hold their breath underwater for one minute, then they might be recruited by the same secret society to which he belonged; there was a serial killer in town who was targeting small boys as they slept, and the only proven way to avert him was to stay awake for three nights on the trot. He would place a prized belonging from Benjamin’s room beneath Michael’s bed and await the ensuing tantrum, or knock one of the boy’s glasses from the table, casually, when the adults were in another room. ‘You’re so clumsy, Benjamin,’ he would say, continuing to eat, and Ethan – being slighter, and younger, and with my unwavering support – would usually be believed.