I wake up as I hear them coming down the steps sometime later and listen to the key rattling in the lock. In my lowest moods I decide I’ll ask for that key back, ‘for a friend’, an excuse I’ve used before, but they seem to have a little stash of them in reserve in case I absentmindedly forget who owns the place.

With a wide smile of welcome, I jump to my feet and there’s my father in a Burberry trench coat, carrying an overnight bag and holding the door for my mother, who comes in with her cream hair blending with her fur-trimmed cream cape, fluttering, elegant and distant.

‘Hi! Hi! Come in!’ I say, even though they’re already very much inside.

I don’t recognise my mother at first. Without a shadow of a doubt, even despite my habit of scrutinising everyone, I would have passed her in the street.

My father has mentioned my mother’s ‘tweaks’, as he calls them, and I realise that one of them has involved filling the dimple in her chin. I have the very same dimple and now she’s got rid of hers … What does that mean? We both have the same wide mouth too, only hers is now poutier, even though she’d pouted perfectly adequately with the old one. And her eyes, which had been large and round, are smaller, as if her real face is sitting some distance behind the one she’s currently wearing. She has the eyeholes of Melania Trump.

She looks me up and down without a word, taking in my pencil skirt and white silk blouse. If she could have frowned, she would have. She recoils with a gasp when she sees Dolly. Overreacting is an affectation she’s developed.

‘You’ve still got that ugly old thing,’ she says.

I cover up Dolly’s ears. ‘Don’t offend her, she’ll come and get you in the night.’

My mother pretends not to hear.

‘Bloody Marys,’ I say cheerfully, sweeping my hand in the direction of the kitchen island as if I’m introducing them to each other.

‘Thank you, darling,’ my father says, putting his hands on my shoulders briefly in what passes as a hug.

‘It’s warm in here,’ my mother remarks in a troubled way. She looks around with the restlessness of discontent, fanning her strange and unfamiliar face. ‘Isn’t it warm?’

It isn’t, actually, because the heating went off at ten, but my mother’s menopausal, so I agree with her. ‘It’s been very sunny today and hot air sinks, doesn’t it?’

‘It rises,’ my father says.