Peter went to the bar. He returned with two pints — one for each of them — and two glasses of something for the girls. Lemonade, probably, or one of those fruit drinks that comes in bottles shaped like animals, the provenance of which is unclear but the sugar content of which is beyond dispute.

"Right," Peter said, setting the glasses down. "Darts?"

The girls were installed at a table near the window. Eira had produced the crayons — promised in the car, delivered now — and was already drawing, her head bent over the paper, her tongue between her teeth, the absolute concentration of a child engaged in creative work. Tima sat beside her, drawing too, though Tima's drawing was more abstract — spirals and lines and colours placed without representational intent, the drawing of a child who is interested in the act of making marks rather than the marks themselves.

Hoppy sat between them, presiding.

Papa and Peter threw darts. Papa was better — his hand was steadier, his aim more precise, the product of a childhood spent throwing things at targets in Scandinavian forests rather than Cornish pubs — but Peter was more committed, the way Peter was more committed to everything, each dart thrown with the full weight of his body behind it, the dart leaving his hand with a velocity that was impressive and a trajectory that was unpredictable.

"Twenty!" Peter announced, pulling his dart from the board.

"That's the five, Peter."

"It's near the twenty."

"Near isn't in."

"In spirit, it's in."

The band started playing. Something that might have been a Stereophonics song, filtered through the particular interpretation of two men with one guitar and a box drum and the complete confidence of people who have decided that momentum is more important than accuracy. The music filled the pub the way firelight fills a room — not by illuminating everything but by changing the quality of the everything, by making the mundane warmer, the ordinary softer, the Saturday afternoon into something that would, years from now, be remembered not for its events but for its feeling.

Tima looked up from her drawing. She was listening. Her head tilted — the way it did, the way it always did when something caught the particular channel of her attention, the tilt of a child tuning in to a frequency that interested her. Her feet, dangling from the chair, began to swing in a rhythm that was not quite the rhythm of the music but was adjacent to it, the rhythm of a two-and-a-half-year-old's relationship with time, which is approximate, which is musical in intent if not in execution.

"I like this song," she said.

Eira, without looking up: "It's not a real song. Real songs have drums."

"It has drums."

"That's a box."

"A box can be drums."

Eira considered this. The logic was sound. She returned to her drawing.