I still didn’t say anything, waiting to see where all this was leading.

‘Anyway, dahling Jools … my girlfriend Jools’ – I knew it would come – ‘understands me.’ With the unspoken implication that I didn’t. ‘She’s a London creature too … and realizes how much my soul is nourished just by being in the place … and Jools knows how disappointed I feel when I have to curtail my metropolitan delights by needing to catch the last train back to dreary old Chichester … and so she – the little angel – has said that, whenever I want to … there’s a spare bed I can use in her bijou little flatette!’

‘Well, that’ll be very nice for you,’ I said, somewhat drily.

‘I assume Jools has made the same offer to you,’ insinuated Fleur, knowing that she hadn’t.

Maybe it was talking about the child with whom I didn’t have a relaxed relationship made me think about the one with whom I did. Or at least I always had had in the past. Though now I wondered. Insecurity about Ben was niggling away at me.

I don’t know if it was a gender thing, but I’d always felt closer to him than Jools. As a little child, she had always been a ‘Daddy’s girl’, but drifted away from Oliver in the year before he died. And when he did die, she seemed almost indifferent to his absence. I knew she couldn’t really be, but she had found a very efficient way of damming up her emotions and, coincidentally, shutting me out. I sometimes worried what would happen when the floodgates opened. Currently, though, her self-constructed dam showed no signs of fracture.

I knew it was too soon after my last attempt to contact Ben. I didn’t want to sound like a worried mother. Tough, of course, because that was exactly what I was. I rang the mobile and got his voicemail again. Of course I did. He was a student, it was term-time, he was in a lecture or a seminar or at the library. I left no message. I stopped the call.

But I couldn’t leave it there. Instead, I texted him. The minimum. ‘All OK? Love, Mum.’

The moment I’d sent it, I felt stupid and overreacting. I returned sheepishly to the invoices.

Almost as quickly as he could possibly have done it, my mobile pinged with his returned text.

‘Take a chill pill, Ma. No red hair issues. X B.’

It made me smile. When Ben called me ‘Ma’, it was always in a slightly joshing manner, as though he had put the word in quotes. The use of ‘chill pill’ was also slightly sending me up. He had a habit of addressing me in old-fashioned slang.

The ‘red hair’ was also reassuring. And it did answer the question I’d really been wanting to ask him. Ben was quoting his father. I don’t think Oliver had ever used the expression directly to him, but he’d said it often enough to me and I must have passed it on to Ben.