It was all in the voice.

Once the embarrassment over his father’s method of passing began to fade, Fat Charlie just felt empty.

“I don’t have any family,” he said to Rosie, almost petulantly.

“You’ve got me,” she said. That made Fat Charlie smile. “And you’ve got my mum,” she added, which stopped the smile in its tracks. She kissed him on the cheek.

“You could stay over for the night,” he suggested. “Comfort me, all that.”

“I could,” she agreed, “but I’m not going to.”

Rosie was not going to sleep with Fat Charlie until they were married. She said it was her decision, and she had made it when she was fifteen; not that she had known Fat Charlie then, but she had decided. So she gave him another hug, a long one. And she said, “You need to make your peace with your dad, you know.” And then she went home.

He spent a restless night, sleeping sometimes, then waking, and wondering, and falling back asleep again.

He was up at sunrise. When people got in to work he would ring his travel agent and ask about bereavement fares to Florida, and he would phone the Grahame Coats Agency and tell them that, due to a death in the family, he would have to take a few days off and yes, he knew it came out of his sick leave or his holiday time. But for now he was glad that the world was quiet.

He went along the corridor to the tiny spare room at the back of the house and looked down into the gardens below. The dawn chorus had begun, and he could see blackbirds, and small hedge-hopping sparrows, a single spotted-breasted thrush in the boughs of a nearby tree. Fat Charlie thought that a world in which birds sang in the morning was a normal world, a sensible world, a world he didn’t mind being a part of.