"Well they haven't, have they?" I'd said shortly. “They've asked me. And anyway, it's only the two of them rattling around on their own down there. Hugo and Christina are sailing round the Greek islands or something."

"Great. While the ex-wife works her butt off for his parents."

I hadn't responded. And I was quiet now as I navigated the lanes, remembering the two spots of color which had risen in anger in her cheeks, her sharp eyes fierce as she'd resumed work on her canvas. We drove on in silence. At length the rain abated. The sky began to clear and, as we reached the top of another hill, the sun finally came out. In a blaze of glory, the beauty of the Cornish countryside suddenly unfolded dramatically around us: a panoramic sweep of granite walls, sheep-dotted fields flowing over lush green hills and flooding into valleys: countryside I knew so well, having grown up here. Not in one of the pretty, low-lying farms, or in a grand house overlooking the sea like the one to which we were headed, but a stone cottage on the outskirts of a closed-looking village, similar to the ones we'd already passed through.

My mother no longer lived here, having darted instinctively to London to be near me when Hugo had left me and Peter was small: she knew viscerally I needed her, even though I had funds enough for all the help in the world. There she still was, round the corner from me, this born-and-bred countrywoman, in a one-bedroomed apartment off the Wandsworth Bridge Road, a good twenty minutes’ walk from a decent patch of green, traffic roaring past her window every day. Our old home, or indeed, just Home, was coming up in moments but I wouldn't tell Celia. She'd be far too fascinated and want to stop and peer, but I'd have to do it with several boulders in my throat. Instead we cruised on past the plain granite house, set back from the road, with its four sash windows and garden at the back, plus a small paddock for the pony which was all I'd ever wanted in life.

The field and the pony had been rented and bought for a song respectively by Mum when my father had died, in some vain attempt to plug an enormous gap, which, to our intense mutual surprise, it did. Mum was so like that, I thought, as the house disappeared in my rear-view mirror: making impulsive decisions which confounded all expectations and turned out to be dynamite. I certainly couldn't do without her in London, but I knew she missed her friends, her own life, her little decorating business, which had worked so well down here, but was harder to set up in town with all the competition.

"Oh nonsense, I've got heaps of friends and loads of clients," she'd say, if I even vaguely suggested her returning to Cornwall.