Embarrassed at such a display of extraordinary affection, Henna patted Shona’s back tentatively. ‘Teh, you’ll injure yourself diving around like that,’ she said. ‘Jau, Shona, go make your old mother some more tea.’ When Shona went to the kitchen, Henna took out her compact and checked that her daughter’s embrace hadn’t shifted her exquisitely applied maquillage. Motherhood wasn’t really a role she had willingly chosen, she acknowledged to herself, satisfied that her lipstick was in place and her eyeshadow remained smoky and elegant; she had only been a starry-eyed teenager when Shona was born, barely more than a child herself. Motherhood had been expedient, that was all; it was her get-out-of-school-free card. But perhaps now she had reached her sixties, now she was almost a grown-up, perhaps she could choose to be a mother, and a glamorous grandmother, too. After all, Omar and Sharif were adults now, and quite interesting young men, too; they didn’t bore her like Shona had when she was a teenager. Maybe she might even like the baby when it came along - the benefit of being a grandmother was that you could coo and spoil but not have any of the tiresome responsibility that went with parenting, and when you’d had enough, you could just hand the baby back.

Shona popped her head back around the kitchen door, and caught her mother patting her powder back into place. ‘Mamma, you told everyone in Dhaka that you were coming to the UK to join your husband, didn’t you? You told them that you’d agreed to join him in his retirement here, rather than have him join you in Dhaka. You covered up why he wasn’t going back.’

Henna winked at her conspiratorially. ‘I might have … given that impression, Shona moni. Truth-telling is all very well, but it doesn’t do to tell everyone everything, you know. One messy public separation in the family is quite enough to be getting on with for a while.’

Party in the Park