The air in the house had always carried a certain busyness. Perhaps a clatter of some sort as she organised cutlery or buttons or DVDs that she was never going to watch, or the hum of the washing or sewing or drying machine, or the indistinct babble of her chatting for hours on the phone to friends she barely liked but spoke to because otherwise she’d burst from keeping all that gossip inside her, or telling the cat off for doing something mundanely cat-like and in no way reprehensible (he’d always got the impression she had wanted the cat to be a person, maybe a substitute son in his absence, and she tried to mould it into something it had no hope of being, just as she had tried to do to him). And in the absence of this simmering background noise he could feel the silence seeping out of the carpet and walls, like a fungus, cold and damp.