I knew she had friends — Mum made friends wherever she went — but on the client front there was Mrs Farr downstairs who she did curtains for, Charlie and Anna who adored her and I suspect invented work for her, and Odd Brian who liked to change his walls as regularly as his boyfriends and got Mum in to supervise. But choosing paint colors doesn't pay the bills, and what little money she did earn was mostly from tutoring History of Art, which, years ago, she'd taught. Sometimes she'd pass a few students on to me, particularly if they were rich Russians, claiming she had far too many, but really I knew she worried I didn't make enough from my portrait commissions, about which she was not wrong.

Fortunately, that only affected my own finances. Peter was superbly looked after by Hugo, whose career, after he'd taken over from his father as head of the family water company, had soared to stratospheric heights. I never had to worry about school fees or his holidays, which were coming up, now that school had ended. Hugo was supremely generous — too generous, I sometimes thought. Belinda and Roger, too, showered him with birthday money: a car, I knew, was coming for his eighteenth. None of them could have been kinder, I thought with strange mixed feelings as I gripped the wheel.

We plunged down yet another steeply banked lane, one which I knew led eventually to the sea. And as Peter had got older — well, he'd appreciated the finer things in life. Of course he had. His expensive boarding school, and Hugo's alma mater, had seen to that. So if his friends took him scuba diving in the Caribbean, leaping from their fathers’ boats, well, it was only natural he'd repay their hospitality at either his grandparents or his father's, in Hampstead. I mean, naturally they came to me, too, had always come when he was younger: Jamie, Sam, Freddie — all the gang. But Freddie's parents lived down the road from Hugo, and Sam's just across the Heath, which made it far more convenient to be at his father's when he only had a weekend from school before heading back on a Sunday night. He'd felt uncomfortable, though: and when it had been two weekends at Hugo's on the trot, and then potentially half-term, I remembered him ringing from school.

“The thing is, Mum, Sam's asked me sailing in Norfolk for a few days, and I'd really like to go. And then Phoebe and Minty have both got parties near Dad's, so I thought—"

"Yes, of course stay with Dad, makes complete sense," I'd said quickly, never wanting him to feel awkward, ever, about a situation that was not remotely of his making. I'd vowed long ago never to play the guilt card.

"But I thought maybe I could pop over on the Sunday, before I go back?" he'd said, nevertheless feeling that guilt.