She sits back down and smiles at me fondly. ‘Ben steadfastly refuses to read anything I give him. He’s far more keen on his mardy books.’

This comment has the effect of making me want to simultaneously laugh and cry, and I have to stuff another salmon square into my mouth to ensure I don’t do either. ‘Mardy books’ was a running joke between Mum and me: the books being the gloomy novels by Kafka and Jean-Paul Sartre that began to line my shelves around this time, and the ‘mardy’ being a hangover from her childhood. Mum was born and raised in Sheffield, and when she was in particularly high – or low – spirits, the Yorkshire slang would come tumbling out.

‘Mardy books,’ Daff repeats, grinning at me. ‘I love it. That is Benjamin’s taste exactly.’

Secretly, of course, I preferred non-mardy books. I still do. Adrian Mole and P. G. Wodehouse and Hitchhiker’s Guide and all the other funny, silly novels I fell in love with as a fourteen-year-old. But as a posturing, insecure twenty-year-old, I was tirelessly working to rebrand myself from ‘funny and silly’ to ‘moody and interesting’. And the best way to do that, I reasoned, was to have a mardy book poking out of my jacket at all times as I swanned around campus. Who exactly this was supposed to impress, I have no idea. Possibly Marek and Alice (who, to be fair, did seem quite impressed). Definitely not Daphne (who on one occasion removed a Kierkegaard paperback from my pocket and whacked me over the head with it).

Mum and Daphne are both smiling at me fondly now, giggling at my purported mardiness. I imagine that when this moment happened first time round, I probably found it slightly patronising – like I was a dog that had just performed a trick for them or something. But right now, it fills me with a happiness so intense that I almost feel drunk on it.

The two of them always got on well, right from the start. They spoke on the phone more and more regularly over the years, chatting away about books and telly and things. Now, as I return Daphne’s smile, I suddenly find myself wondering how Mum’s death must have affected her. She loved Mum too, I know she did. And yet after she died, I don’t think I ever even asked Daphne how she was coping or if she was OK. I didn’t once try to go through the grief with her; I just let it push us further and further apart.

Mum turns to Daphne and asks: ‘Has Ben let you read any of his own stuff?’