Around the room I saw a collage of exotic items. On the walls hung Russian icons, Islamic ceramic tiles, silk pictures and tapestries. On shelves and other surfaces stood a samovar, a folding Koran stand, brass bowls, trays and candlesticks, chased silver boxes and Ottoman vases. I remembered Alexandra telling me that her mother had lived ‘all over the bloody world’.

‘I drink my whiskey neat,’ Ingrid called across to me. ‘Do you want ice or water or anything else with it?’

‘Happy with it neat,’ I replied.

I don’t dislike spirits, just very rarely drink them. In fact, I like most alcohol and there have been times in my life – certainly my ‘ladette’ late twenties – when I drank far too much of the stuff. A lot of drinking was involved when I first got together with Oliver too, mostly red wine back then. The genuine reason for my current moderation – as I keep telling my mother, though she never believes me – is that losing my licence would kill the SpaceWoman business stone dead.

I’m also glad that the same fear stops me from drinking too much on my own at home. The occasional large Merlot and that’s it. I’ve seen from my work how easily the drinking can build up along with the hoarding. With sufficient alcohol in your system, you cease to notice the chaos of your surroundings. And, for a while, cease to feel the pain of whatever started you hoarding in the first place.

Reading between the lines of what Alexandra told me, I’d deduced that her mother would chat more freely to someone she was having a drink with, and had planned the evening accordingly. I left the Yeti at home and came by train. There’s a rackety service that runs along the coast from Portsmouth Harbour to Brighton, stopping conveniently at Chichester – and at more South Coast villages than you would imagine a cartographer could invent. Most of them end with ‘ing’ – Angmering, Goring, Worthing, Lancing, et cetera. And, more importantly, there’s a station at Hove.

Ingrid handed me whiskey in a squat, thick-bottomed glass. ‘Slánte!’ she said, clicking hers against mine before taking a grateful slurp.

‘Slánte!’ I echoed, following suit, mildly intrigued as to why she used the Irish toast. Though it was a while since I’d drunk the stuff, I was surprised by the taste. Sweeter than I was expecting.

Ingrid read my reaction. ‘We’re drinking “whiskey” with an “e”,’ she explained. ‘Irish. Jameson’s.’

‘Fine by me,’ I said.

She arranged her long limbs on a hard wooden chair, which she’d turned around to face away from her desk, on which an open laptop and an overspilling ashtray perched on layers of paper. A mixture of books, diaries, and browning newspaper clippings. These spread from the desktop over the floor, then into separate piles on other surfaces, in what a casual observer might have seen as chaos. Experience had told me, though, that it could well be an efficient personal filing system, whose originator could instantly find any relevant document. Untidiness does not always indicate lack of control.