But Harvey had been right about one thing: it had been time for me to leave home. Dad and I had become too reliant on each other. He took on a business partner when I left; a man who could do the aerial cutting that I’d always done. And although I wouldn’t go so far as to say I was deliriously happy right now, I’d managed to survive six months in the capital, living and working with someone other than a family member. Not bad for a confirmed home bird like me.

I stowed my garden tools safely where they couldn’t cause injury to the public and scurried after Paula. I caught up with her just as she reached the ‘authorized personnel only’ door in the side of the building and pulled it open for her.

‘Good weekend?’ I asked, using my question as an opportunity to scan her face for clues as to what sort of mood she was in.

She stopped and leaned on the door frame to flick clumps of mud from her shoes. I took the hint and wiped my wet boots on the mat.

Paula sighed. ‘The weekends are never long enough, are they? No sooner do we finish on a Friday afternoon than …’ She clicked her fingers. ‘Snap. Monday morning rolls back round and we’re off again. Noses to the grindstone.’

‘Too true.’ I tried to smile rather than grimace. I daren’t tell her that just lately my weekends had stretched to an interminable length as Harvey had become increasingly bad-tempered and – yes, I was going to admit it to myself – erratic. One minute he’d be squeezing the living daylights out of me, declaring that I was his soulmate and he couldn’t live without me, the next he’d fly into a huge sulk after I made an innocuous comment about a work colleague. It was a relief to come back to work every Monday, knowing that because of my early starts and his late finishes at the gym, it would be Saturday before I had to spend many waking hours with him. And if I was lucky, he’d be doing the weekend shift and I could have a few hours to myself.

After I’d helped him design leaflets and deliver them to several hundred houses in the neighbourhood, I’d run out of things to do and had wanted to look for a job. Harvey said he felt humiliated that he couldn’t afford for me to stay at home, and I remember kissing him and saying with a laugh that it was no longer the nineteen fifties and I didn’t expect him to bankroll me. I think that was the day of our first row.