Covering her face with her hands, Eleanor began to rock backward and forward. She shook her head and moaned. She expected tears to start flowing from her eyes in unstoppable streams, but that didn’t happen. She had run out of tears. She had reached the most dreadful part of her letter – she knew what was coming and she dreaded it – she wanted to cut the scene out, the way scenes that were considered too shocking were edited out of films – but of course she couldn’t.

‘The razor, an old-fashioned one, with an ornate mother-of-pearl handle, the stateliest of objects, lay on the floor beside the bath,’ Eleanor whispered. ‘It had belonged to Griff’s grandfather. It was covered in blood. There was blood everywhere, bespattering the walls, on the floor, even on the ceiling – the small cassette player that stood on the little table beside the bath was sticky with blood. I keep seeing that bath – I only need to shut my eyes. There it is now – and again – and again.’

There had been no religious consolations for her in the aftermath of the appalling catastrophe. Eleanor had had a ‘God’ once, but after her husband had left her, she ceased to believe. She had been overcome by grief. She had imagined at first that she could draw on reserves of stoicism and imagination, on her sense of the absurd, but she had been wrong – she couldn’t. That was why she had ‘cracked up’ so fast. She’d gone right under. She had had a nervous breakdown. Her shrink had diagnosed something called ‘florid behaviour’. Eleanor had spent a month at a ‘rest home’, undergoing various therapies. She had only the haziest recollection of the things they did to her there. After she had come out, she had developed an interest in spiritualism. She had been keeping a psychic journal, in which she regularly recorded her attempts to reach her dead son.

‘Sticky,’ she said again.