I didn’t rise to it. I’d heard it too often. Why my mother constantly downgrades my career from decluttering to cleaning, I have no idea, but she’d been doing it so long that I no longer give her the angry response she so craves. She had always diminished me and played down my achievements. In most mother/daughter relationships, the analysis would be that the older woman was jealous of the younger, but in this case, there was nothing for her to be jealous of. She had a level of celebrity, I was just a working widow. And although she’d never take this on board, there was no area of her life in which I had any desire to be competitive.

In her time, Fleur Bonnier had been a moderately successful actress – no, sorry, her current taste for the politically correct would demand that I say ‘actor’. And perhaps I’m being mean to put the ‘moderately’ in there. She was successful. There were a good few months of which she was the flavour. Perhaps, to be fair, years. She was still to be seen in ancient British movies screened at strange hours on television. Never playing the lead … the flighty friend, the earlier lover rejected in favour of the female star, the murderer’s wife, that kind of part. But she did them well. Fleur Bonnier was a trouper.

Unfortunately, those months or years of her success had coincided with my childhood. Once her theatre friends had stopped praising her ‘bravery’ in having a child out of wedlock, Fleur rather lost interest in me. Evenings she was on stage, daytimes she was filming for movies or television. I got used to being farmed out to more or less unwilling relatives and friends. I got used to not letting it get to me.

As I got used to calling her ‘Fleur’. Her idea, obviously. Initially, to give the totally false impression that we were girlie chums. Later, because a galumphing teenager who claimed her as a mother didn’t do much for the age she was trying to live down to.

Fleur always blamed any shortcomings in her mothering skills on the demands of her profession. Though I don’t think it would have made that much difference if I’d seen more of her, if she’d been a stay-at-home mum. Her consuming obsession with herself didn’t leave any excess affection available for something like a daughter. She had always given me the impression that her life would be more convenient if I wasn’t part of it. Apart from anything else, having a child did rather interfere with her complicated romantic entanglements.

I don’t want to imply that Fleur and I were permanently at daggers drawn. I had long since lowered my expectations of what might be expected from her as a mother and learned not to respond to the permanent trickle of salt with which she dressed my wounds.

She was currently in one of the more settled periods of her life. Hardly acting at all – she’d had her moment in the sun – Fleur Bonnier was now married to a Chichester solicitor called Kenneth, who spent his weekdays in the office and his weekends playing golf. He gave her free run of his gold card and she suggested – often in public and embarrassingly – that he was rewarded by a sex life beyond his wildest imaginings. Like many of my mother’s boasts, that was one I took with a whole cellarful of salt.