I stared and stared at the brassy memorial, at the shrivelled bouquets, at the single rose in a plastic case preserved chemically – but they meant nothing to me. I wasn’t the same person who’d been on that coach that night in such a very bad state. I wasn’t the person who’d spiralled into the breakdown last summer that Charlie had predicted, despite my very best efforts not to, while I was convalescing at my father’s. I wasn’t the same person who’d sobbed and sobbed about my mother and my boyfriend and the abyss of loneliness I floundered in, sobbing on the figurative shoulder of the therapist, a kindly older man with sad eyes and a cropped beard and a nose with a knobble on the end that quivered sometimes when he spoke. A man who my frantic father was paying to listen, to assure me that, no, I wasn’t mad; I was more than my mother’s daughter. That I would be all right, honestly, it might just take some time to recover from this trauma.

The truth was that I was still screaming in silent anguish, screaming into the yearning void my mother had left, and Alex’s last actions had finally released the pressure building since my teens.

The last time I’d seen him, the man with the knobbly nose had studied me hard. ‘And this boyfriend, this man with all the addictions. Why him, Maggie? Why did you pick him?’

I stared miserably out of the window, where a cloud shaped rather like my mother’s floppy wedding hat was scudding by. ‘He made me laugh,’ I ventured after some time.

‘And?’

‘And what?’ I sought for more. ‘Alex is very bright. And I loved his passion for life. He was passionate about everything.’ I corrected myself. ‘Is passionate, I mean.’ He wasn’t dead, after all.

‘And they are the only reasons?’

‘No,’ I said slowly, ‘I suppose not.’

‘So?’

‘So.’ I took a deep breath. ‘He needed me.’

There was a long pause. ‘And you wanted to be needed?’

Yes. I wanted to be needed.

And the man didn’t say it, but we both knew what he meant.

Like your mother hadn’t needed you.

‘Like my mother hadn’t,’ I whispered.

One day after that, my father collected the dog from Alex’s and took us both to Greenwich Park. ‘You know, Maggie,’ he said quietly, throwing a stick for the scruffy little terrier, ‘your mother loved you more than anything in the world.’

We stood next to one another on the hill that overlooked the far-off Thames, sparkling in the early-morning sun, the Queen’s House below us a pristine white against the green sweep of grass. The spire of Our Lady Star of the Sea spiked the Indian-summer sky. It reminded me of the first joke I ever told.

‘Why did the sky laugh, Mummy?’

‘Why, Mag?’