From the beginning Nathan had been … not evasive exactly, more, impatient; more, dismissive. ‘My dad’s … well,’ he had said abruptly, one evening, Fran five months pregnant and suddenly looking it, and they’d been talking about getting stuff, laughing on the sofa about whether he could put a cot together. ‘You get to a point, don’t you, when you see what they’re like. Really like.’ Warily Fran had nodded, because she did know, because she’d got to that point fairly early, with her mother. Her dreamy mother, who would rather have been a sister than a parent. Nathan’s mother was in institutional care: she’d been bedridden for more than two years, unable to feed herself for five. He went there to see her three or four times a year, he said. Thinking of her own mother Fran had asked if she could come with him but he had been categorical. ‘They say she’s losing the ability to swallow,’ he had said, coming back the last time. So there was only really his father.
