I watch Daphne smiling as she flicks idly through the Highsmith novel. I can’t remember how much I’d told her about my dad at this stage. Not that much, I don’t think. She’d asked me about him, of course, and she knew he wasn’t around. What more was there to say? He’d left when I was ten, and the number of times I’d seen him since could probably be counted on the fingers of one hand. I guess I didn’t talk to Daphne about him because I didn’t want to seem wimpy and pathetic: a twenty-year-old man who still hadn’t got over his dad leaving. I didn’t want Daff to pity me.

Obviously, though, she knew all about his work. Pretty much every student on our course did. While he wasn’t quite established enough to be an actual part of our modules (that would’ve been too awful to imagine), he was still regarded as one of the coolest modern British playwrights around. In Sunday supplements, his name was thrown about regularly as a potential successor to Pinter and Tom Stoppard, so any reference to him in a lecture or seminar would send every head turning my way.

They weren’t to know, I suppose, that I had no sort of relationship with him at all.

Looking back now, I can see that that’s what all the mardy books nonsense was really about. Throughout this whole period – late teens, early twenties – my idea of him was in constant flux. One minute I hated him for leaving; the next I desperately wanted his approval. Just before I left for uni, I’d come across an interview with him in a newspaper in which he cited his five favourite books – every one of them unmistakably mardy. Without even thinking about it, I’d ordered the lot. I still can’t explain why. Did I really expect to bump into him randomly in the street, with one of them poking out of my pocket? Probably not. But it was always a possibility.

Mum clears the plates away and then starts rifling about noisily inside the fridge. ‘Right,’ she says, ‘it’s after midday, it’s Christmas Eve …’ She turns around cradling a large bottle of cava. ‘I think we are obliged to start drinking.’

‘Hear, hear,’ says Daphne.

I get up to fetch some glasses, realising yet again that everything – right down to the cartoonish squeal Mum makes as the cork pops – is happening exactly as I remember it first time round. And as incredible as it is to be with Mum again, I can’t help thinking: what is the point?

What is the point of seeing her again and then having her torn away from me a second time? What is the point of seeing how right for each other Daphne and I once seemed, only to end up drunk in our attic again thinking about Alice?