He couldn’t distinguish what his mother said, even once he dragged himself free of the, bedclothes and crouched against the headboard. When he lowered one reluctant foot, it was greeted with a creak by the floor, which felt as chill as his grandmother’s face had last time he’d touched her. More than a dozen hasty paces took him through the dimness thick as the musty curtains, past the audience of hulking half-seen furniture, to the door. He inched it ajar and was confronted by his grandmother’s room.

Her door was shut. That managed to seem reassuring until he thought of the darkness beyond it, even vaster than the dark behind him. Suppose that as he’d ventured to his door, his grandmother had reached hers with far longer strides of her spidery legs and was pressing her face against an upper panel? He was trying to find his next breath when he heard his mother say “I hate to admit it, but Lawrence was right. She was never happy till you knew how much everything she had was worth.”

Jonathan sucked in air so that he could whisper “You were just proud of it, weren’t you, grandma? I expect you still are. You should be, because it’s so nice.”

He was frightened to raise his voice, but equally frightened by the possibility that she was close enough to hear his whisper. He didn’t realise he’d flinched from the prospect that her door might jerk open until the floor creaked beneath him. “Is that you, Jonathan?” his mother called.

He hung onto the door while he closed it as swiftly as he could without making a sound, then had to let go and turn to the glimmering slab of his bed. “I didn’t hear anything. Have a top up so you sleep as well,” he heard Trudy say, and a clink of glass. The creaks of his retreat obscured what the women said next, and once he was huddled in bed he couldn’t understand them. “Please God don’t let my grandma hear anything bad about her,” he began to whisper, interspersed with words to her. “Mum thinks you were the best mum. She’s just talking because she’s upset like her friend said.”