It was a conspiracy, I realised, shrugging him off angrily. ‘I won’t play it, Alex. You might as well get rid of it. You shouldn’t have spent all that money on me anyway.’ I went to poke the dying fire, refusing to catch his eye. ‘And if you’ve talked to my dad, which you obviously have, then you know why I won’t go near it.’

‘I don’t know, Maggie. I really don’t know what you’re on about.’ He looked so confused that I felt a great stab of guilt. But I couldn’t explain. I sat on the footstool in front of the fire and lit the first of many cigarettes, though I was meant to have given up, and Alex went out to the kitchen and came back with an enormous glass of wine which turned into the whole bottle, and we had the most horrible row about me not letting go, of suppressing the past. I said I didn’t want to let go if it meant getting as drunk as he did, though I think I was quite pissed myself.

Then Alex suddenly let rip about my job, about the show I’d done with his dad all those months ago, telling me I shouldn’t be so moral about his drinking when I had no morals myself. I told him that was rubbish, that I just wanted to help people, but he said I was ‘fucking naïve’ – and that I shouldn’t try to change people, especially not him. And then I went to bed alone for the first but not the last time since we’d been together and cried piteously.

In the morning Alex brought me fresh coffee and burnt toast in bed – another first and certainly a last – and stroked my hair wordlessly, and I didn’t say anything about how drunk he’d been the night before, and he didn’t mention my job. In front of the fire, I tried to read a book I’d got for Christmas on old royal chefs, but I couldn’t concentrate.

It had snowed in the night and everything was white outside, rounded and smooth like the icing on the Christmas cake I’d made weeks before. Where there should have been hard edges there were none, and it looked quite magical, belying the harsh truth beneath: the naked trees and scraggy shrubs of bleak midwinter. Mendelssohn was playing on the stereo and Digby was chasing his tail in the snow as Alex came in. The coldness from the garden emanated from him; he was freezing despite his thick jumper, the snowflakes melting on the wool wet against my skin, and I wiped one from the bridge of his slightly skewed nose, and wrapped my arms around him to try to warm him.