And that’s where my memory ends, right there, as if that was the end of the story and I’d died at that moment. When I see a dog, I’ve died at that moment ever since.

But it’s not the end of the story. When Alexandra Booth lets me carry on viewing my memories in black and white in the cinema of my imagination, I can see my loving, furious mother running to me, picking me up, cleaning the mud and its grittiness out of my mouth with her manicured fingers. She yells at the dog’s owners and at me for the state my dress and yes, it’s true, I have spoilt it, ruined it, trashed it, sullied it. And in my distress and confusion, I’m not crying from the shock of being chased but for my gold dress, my lovely dress, which I’ve failed to protect as my mother has failed to protect me.

I replay the scene again and again in my mind until I can watch it without crying, until its power is weakened and the memory slides gradually from the present to the past.

Alexandra Booth asks me about my relationship with my mother.

‘She’s a bit self-centred.’ I’ve edited the story in my head and left out the important bits.

I tell her the facts. My mother’s parents were in the army, which was how she came to go to boarding school, which she hated. Her parents had an intense relationship. They loved her, but she always felt the outsider. So as soon as she was able to, she looked for someone of her own to love.

What my mother wanted was to be adored. It shouldn’t have been hard. It was why she became a model. She had the kind of looks that attracted people, the kind of face that never took a bad photograph. She had a mouth that curved up at the edges as if she were always on the brink of a smile, as if her thoughts were always sweet and pleasant. Her hair was pale and glossy, wavy, large eyes looking through a heavy fringe.

I know from photographs that I was a beautiful child, a miniature version of my mother, with the same cleft in my chin and my upturned mouth denoting perpetual enjoyment. Our mouths are a quirk of fate, the stamp of genetics, because obviously neither of us was perpetually happy. Having said that, we were mostly happy, that’s how I remember it, to the delight of my father.

She had the world at her feet, my grandmother liked to say, as if she could have been anything she chose and made a success of it. Which really isn’t true. She liked the parties, the fashion, the runway, the attention, but she didn’t apply herself.

In her opinion, life was about her looks. She was never interested in the bigger picture.