It was Josh. ‘Can you come to Dad’s?’ he said. ‘Christopher’s here and he’s kicking off.’So that’s where he was.‘What’s happened?’ I said. ‘Why’s he kicking off?’‘It’s about Milly moving in. But can you come?’‘Yeah, sure. I’ll see you in a bit.’I filled my car with petrol, bought two new bottles of Radweld and, after putting one of them into the car radiator, drove to Totnes down the Lanes. My hands, which did not look like the big, masculine hands on the diagram on the Radweld bottle, smelled of engine. At night you could go down the Lanes pretty fast, because it was so dark that any car lights ahead were visible for miles. You had to watch out for nocturnal animals, of course, and walkers without torches. But I didn’t drive fast. I drove as slowly as I would in the day. It was a beautiful night, with thousands of stars scattered across the clear black sky. All the stars I could see were long dead, of course, unless we were living in the Second World, in which case they were what?
