Pax watched helplessly as the bottle rolled away from her to the table’s far edge where it teetered like the coach in The Italian Job.

‘Just bloody smash!’ she dared it.

Obligingly it dropped, glass shattering, the distillery reek overpowering.

The puppy whined by the kitchen door.

Snatching him up, grabbing the still-beeping phone too, Pax went outside, teeth chattering as soon as the cold air hit her, not noticing the puppy doubling back inside to hurriedly relieve himself on the doormat. On the phone screen, an alarm reminder had kicked in: Text children HNY. Call and check Pax okay.

It was so unexpected to find that her mother had calendared anything, let alone New Year greetings to loved ones, Pax felt a confused rush of emotion.

She snoozed the message, quashing an ungrateful afterthought that no mother should need reminding to share a celebration with her children. Ronnie was never invited to join in family revels, after all. Excluded from birthdays, christenings, Easter, Christmas, she was isolated and out of the loop. No Service, just like the message read on her phone face.

Back inside, she scraped up the glass with a dustpan and brush and mopped the floor as best she could, but the smell lingered, single malt running in rivulets between the flagstones, soaking through grout holes, washing in a tide beneath the dresser’s oak skirting. She opened one of its cupboards, her throat catching to see her grandparents’ dusty collection of kitchen ‘snifters’ still stored in there, the labels yellowed. Blended Scotch and supermarket sherry, knocked back in heavy-bottomed glasses at the farmhouse table, the malts and fino served to guests in crystal tumblers in the drawing room.

‘One toasts days to remember and drowns nights to forget,’ her grandmother Ann had been fond of saying, a Dorothy Parker in tweed and gaberdine, she could outdrink and outthink most men.

If Pax had her Ledwell grandmother’s soul, she liked to think she had her Percy grandmother’s spirit – and love of spirits. She was nothing like her self-destructive father, she reminded herself, the smell making her gag. Nor was she a guzzler like so many of her friends; no Wine O’Clock, Mummy’s Glass, bottle-a-night habit for her. She’d knocked that on the head when the recycling got conspicuous, which is how she knew she could control it. She’d simply been brought up at the hip of an old-fashioned matriarch who rode, dog-walked, stood her ground, fought her corner and outdrank her husband into her seventies. Alice was the same. It was in their DNA.

And like her grandmother, she wasn’t afraid of speaking her mind.

Determined and furious, she marched outside with her phone, stumbling through the fog to the far end of the walled garden where a bar of signal was occasionally possible when balancing on the old compost heap, her fingers shaking almost too much to tap the screen. Bingo!

Try to take our son away and I’ll make you wish you’d never lived! she texted Mack.