‘I’m glad, too,’ I tell her. ‘Though to be honest, just before I got up to do it, I thought I was going to lose it completely. I’m sorry.’

She shakes her head almost angrily. ‘Ben, are you crazy? You don’t have to say sorry. You should be losing it. You don’t ever have to apologise for that.’

‘I do, Daff. I wish I’d told her … I wish I could have said sorry to her.’

‘Don’t be so silly. What would you possibly need to say sorry for?’

And so, finally, I decide to tell her.

Chapter Thirty-Two

It was a Sunday night, eight days before she died.

Daphne and I were supposed to be round at Mum’s for dinner, but Daff had been called to some last-minute film screening in Soho. So in the end, it was just Mum and me.

And that felt weird for a start, because at that point I hadn’t actually seen Mum, just the two of us, for a while. Whenever we met up, Daff was usually there too – the old clichés about hating your mother-in-law being totally untrue in our case – and her presence always softened the edges, made the conversation flow more easily. Not just because she was upbeat and fun, in contrast to my usual mardiness around that time, but because she actually had stuff going on in her life. She had things to talk about. She’d tell Mum about whatever exciting project she was currently working on, or whatever gossip she’d heard about such-and-such actor or writer. Mum loved all that.

But I had nothing going on, nothing to say. So when it was just the two of us, the room felt smaller somehow, the silences harder to fill.

And on that particular Sunday night, they felt even harder than usual. I was in the middle of an arid spell work-wise, staring down the barrel of another entirely blank week, so I arrived at Mum’s in a pretty rotten mood. And over the course of dinner, it got steadily worse, despite the deliciousness of her beef-and-Yorkshire-pudding Sunday roast. We small-talked our way through the meal, and when the plates were cleared away and soaking in the sink, Mum made coffee and set a slab of the posh Waitrose dark chocolate she liked on the table between us.

‘So, what time will Daphne be home tonight?’ she asked.

‘No idea.’ I shrugged.

Mum tutted and broke off a chunk of chocolate. ‘Poor girl. They work her far too hard at that place.’

‘She’s all right. She enjoys it.’

‘Yes, well, it’s brilliant that she’s doing so well.’

I shrugged again at this, tore off some of the silver foil from the chocolate wrapper and curled it into a tight, tiny ball between my fingers.