The only trouble with getting quite so high is that you must inevitably come down again. And the crash is painful and hard. It’s a long way down from bliss.

At the start I think Alex saw me as his salvation – as perhaps I saw him as mine – and he hardly drank. Then the novelty wore off. I didn’t know he was already battling with an addiction that had its avaricious fingers clasped right inside his core; a greedy bastard of compulsion that wouldn’t let him go, that clung on like a succubus.

It took me a while to realise quite how steadfast that hold was – and when I did, it was too late to get out. It had been easy to let Alex become my mainstay. Before him, it had been work, always work, but years of suppressing my childhood pain now imploded, and I was distracted by his debauchery. I was sick of being sensible – perhaps that was the problem.

After only a few months we bought a flat together in Borough Market, much to my father’s politely alarmed surprise. Alex was already in the process of buying it when we met and, on a whim, asked me to come in with him. On a similar whim, I said yes. Initially I worried about leaving Bel’s, but Alex had just introduced her to Johnno, and so for a while my best friend and I celebrated our luck, our most fortuitous timing.

Alex and I spent our first Christmas alone in Cornwall. I cooked goose and red cabbage with apples and the most perfect roast potatoes (even if I did say so myself) on Christmas Day, although we probably drank more than we ate. I gave Alex a stocking full of silly stuff, false teeth you could wind up, bubble bath and tangerines. Alex bought me mittens because my hands were always cold, he said; a dustpan and brush because I was always breaking things – and a battered oak piano.

Maybe that was the beginning of the bad stuff. I didn’t want a piano; I didn’t want any reminder of my mother; though most of all I didn’t want to spoil Christmas Day. I tried hard to pretend I was glad, but I couldn’t overcome my dismay. On Boxing Day, after we’d walked Digby on the blustery beach, Alex asked me to play. I’d been dreading this moment.

‘I can’t,’ I said stiffly, slicing the Christmas cake with a shaking hand, ‘I don’t play any more.’

Alex tried to put his arm around me. ‘But I’ve been dying to hear you. Your dad said you’re great. He said he hoped you’d start again.’