All empathy wiped clean once more, my mother says suspiciously, ‘You’re telling us you’re a market trader?’ as if it’s some elaborate story I’ve made up to make a fool of her.

I take a business card out of my wallet, which depicts me standing against a wall of flowers in a Sixties minidress. ‘Look!’ I say. ‘That dress is Pucci. You had one like that, didn’t you?’

She knows I’m trying to get around her and she doesn’t reply.

Some vague desperation for that old connection makes me persevere. ‘Gorgeous, isn’t it? Marilyn Munro was buried in Pucci, you know.’

‘I’m assuming not in this specific dress.’

Ha ha, she’s hilarious, my mother.

She reads the business card slowly, at arm’s-length, too proud for reading glasses. ‘Fern Banks Vintage.’ She hands it back to me and sighs, summing up my enterprise with her own brand of snobbery. ‘In other words, you’re selling people’s cast-offs.’

That hurts.

I reply lightly, forcing a smile. ‘That’s one way of putting it.’

‘And you hope to make a living this way?’ my father asks.

‘Yes, I do. I never pay over the odds. I look for styles and buy diffusion lines, nothing too out there, just clothes for women to look good in.’

‘As opposed to?’

‘Look …’ I’m talking too fast and too defensively, I know, but I want them to understand that this is something I can make a go of. ‘This is something I’m actually good at. And I’m building a decent client list.’ I’m stretching the truth a bit here, obviously. But it’s early days.

A deep weariness has come over them.

See? I think bitterly. Dressing people up in a department store doesn’t seem such a bad job now, does it?

My mother expresses her disapproval by emanating a dense and disappointed silence.

I play with a button on the Barcelona footstool. The silence is just starting to get uncomfortable, when: ‘How’s Mick?’ my father asks casually, breaking it.

That didn’t take long, did it? ‘He’s fine! He sends his love.’ I say that to annoy them. It’s not the kind of thing that Mick would do, send his love to my parents. They’ve only met once, briefly, on my birthday, and he wasn’t what they wanted for me. What he thought of them, he didn’t say. He never gives them a second thought.

They digest my comment for a moment.

‘Your mother and I have been talking about the flat,’ my father says, crossing one leg over the other.

‘Oh, really?’ I feel nervous, as if I’m no longer on solid ground, and I stare at his feet. For a moment I think that what I’m seeing is his pale bare ankle, but no, he’s wearing beige socks.