She was worried about someone - no names, no image, just a conceptual knot thatignual kno was full of warmth and uncritical love - and worried in a different way about the time she was wasting as she stood here talking to me. She was also embarrassed about the kitchen knife, and she glanced down at it now as she disengaged her hand from my grip.

‘Cooking his lunch,’ she said by way of explanation as she held up the knife for my inspection. ‘I should get back, really. I can’t turn the ring down all the way and the fat might catch. Things aren’t.’

I thought I might have misheard those last two words, because they didn’t seem to be attached to the rest of the sentence in any meaningful way. But Mrs Daniels saw my puzzled blink and went on with barely a break.

‘Well, you asked me if things were going well for him - for Mister Seddon. They’re not. He’s going from bad to worse, really. I don’t think he’s ever got over it. He puts a brave face on, because you’ve got to, but it’s not something that ever goes away, is it? You’d always wonder if there was anything you could have done.

’

I was lost in this welter of restricted code. I tilted my head in polite inquiry. ‘Anything you could have done to . . . ?’

‘Well, to stop it,’ Mrs Daniels said, looking at me with eyes that carried a full share of the world’s hurt. ‘I mean, you’d be thinking that if you’d seen the signs early enough you could have said something. Got some help. I know they say you can’t, but I think it depends on the circumstances, doesn’t it?’

It seemed safest to agree. ‘What were the circumstances?’ I asked earnestly. ‘I’ve never felt able to ask.’

Mrs D shook her head bleakly. ‘I could tell you some tales,’ she said, with a lack of enthusiasm that belied the words. ‘But I won’t. Not now. The time to have said something was before, when it might have done some good. I blame myself. We all should blame ourselves. He deserved better. Whatever was going on at home .

. .’ She paused, then went on quickly, nervously, as if she’d just stepped across an unacknowledged abyss and didn’t want to look down. ‘He still deserved better. We’ve all got a responsibility, I think, don’t you? To say what can’t be said? A boy that age has got his whole life ahead of him. I used to see him with the girls, and there were two or three who wouldn’t have said no if he’d asked. But he was lost. He never looked like he was in the same world as everyone else. And then you start to hear the stories, from the other boys. My John’s the same age, but it was my Billy, my youngest, funnily enough, who knew him better than anyone. And he’s said things that pulled me up short, more than once. It was there. He wasn’t hiding it. A hundred people saw it, and twice as many as that knew all about it. But nobody said a thing, did they? Nobody ever does. That’s what I meant when I said we were all to blame.’"

"She’d talked herself into a state of mild distress, her voice becoming more animated as she wrestled with her own undefined sin.

Now she looked at me expectantly, but I had no idea what it was she was expecting. Commiseration? Absolution? A smack on the wrist? I struggled to find a loose thread in her tone poem that I could seize and pull at to see if it unravelled. Kenny Seddon was a bit long in the tooth to be called a boy, so presumably this ‘he’ was someone else. A son? Did Kenny have a family? I was nearly cm"" was neertain that Gary had said he lived alone. I opened my mouth to frame a question that wouldn’t give away my ignorance.

A bellow with a lot of bass in it sounded from the open door at Mrs Daniels’s back, drowning out whatever I was going to say. ‘Jean! Jeanie! Is there a shirt in here that’s been ironed?’

Mrs Daniels folded in on herself in some subtle, mostly non-physical way. ‘That’s my Tom,’ she said. ‘I’ve got to go.’ She stepped back over the threshold, starting to close the door.

Then she stopped abruptly, her face splitting open in a radiant smile that took me completely by surprise. It wasn’t for me, though: she was looking past me along the hallway, and whatever it was she was seeing made that infolding reverse itself; made her open up again, like a flower at the end of a long, dark night.

‘It never fails,’ she said, her voice suddenly alive with droll over-emphasis. ‘Put some chips in a pan, and here he comes.’

I turned to see the blond boy, Bic, walking towards me. He gave me a puzzled glance, nodded vaguely, and then submitted to his mother’s exuberant embrace. When she’d squashed him a little out of shape, she held him at arm’s length for inspection. ‘You’re filthy,’ she said. ‘You can wash before you eat, you little urchin.’ She took the sting out of the words by tousling his hair with the same vigour that she’d applied to the hug.