"Oh, that's mad, Peter – it's no ‘pop’, as we know. Tell you what," I'd said, making it up on the spot, "I need to go to Green and Stone for paint that week, why don't we meet halfway and have lunch in the King's Road?"

He'd agreed happily, relieved. And I'd taken him to the Bluebird. Even though Peter went carefully for pasta and not a steak, and I even more carefully went for a salad, what with a glass of wine each and then two tubes of oils in the ruinously expensive paint shop opposite – he insisted on coming with me so I'd had to buy something I'd had to ring Mum on the bus on the way home and grab a Russian, pronto, to pay.

It had been lovely to see him, though; we hadn't drawn breath. Luckily, Peter wasn't of the grunting, laconic school of teenage boy. He was open and chatty about school, work, mates, sailing, which he loved — girls, even and I'd drunk in his floppy blond fringe, huge smile and creasing blue eyes over lunch. So like his father. And I'd almost fainted with pleasure when he'd asked me to look around Oxford with him.

"But don't you want Dad to do that? He'll know far more than me about colleges."

"Exactly, and I know he'll push Brasenose — and why not, I might well apply — but I kind of wanted to look with my own eyes. And actually, I thought you might like to."

"I'd adore to," I'd beamed. Of course I'd adore to. The culmination of all my motherly pride and his hard work — the final hurdle. I couldn't stop smiling, actually, and had recklessly ordered us another glass of wine on the strength of it.

"What are you looking so happy about?" Celia cut into my reverie as I wound down a now extremely familiar lane, brimming with red campion and orange crocosmia, to the coast.

"What? Oh, I was just thinking about Peter and me looking round Oxford."

"Oh, right. I thought you'd already done that?"

"We have. I was just remembering us creeping round Christ Church. We weren't supposed to go in, but a door was open and we got lost and giggly up a staircase. Some crusty don threw open his door and barked so ferociously we nearly fell down the stairs."

She smiled. "You've done a good job there," she said candidly, which was high praise from Celia, who mostly said I obsessed about Peter. "Or the school has. But at that price they should. Is that the sea or the sky?"

“The sea," I said happily, my heart rising inexorably at the sight of it, and also, at getting Celia off the thorny topic of the iniquities of a private education, despite the fact she'd had one and I hadn't. "It'll flit in and out from now on, but keep your eyes on that gap in the hills."