‘There was hardly any – it only took twenty minutes. I did it when I got back.’

‘Can I see?’

‘Mum, I’m thirteen!’

‘I know, I know. I’m not checking on you, I’m just curious. New school – I want to see what they give you.’

‘It was maths.’ With a display of weary tolerance, Lennie unfolded herself from the sofa and went to get her backpack. Robin felt a stab of guilt – yet another. Twenty minutes’ homework – what the hell? It was at least two hours a night at Ravenscourt Park Girls and for her at the grammar school, too, back in the day. She’d spent hours hunched at the little desk upstairs, radio blasting in her ear, and Lennie had as well, back in London. That had been one of Robin’s favourite things, coming home to find Len and Naomi, the sixth former who’d ‘babysat’ her after school, sitting at the kitchen table with their mugs of tea, earbuds in, so focused they hardly looked up when she came through the door. Naomi had been gutted when she’d told her they were moving – getting paid to do her homework, time away from her own place, tea and biscuits on tap: dream gig for a teenager.

Lennie handed her a file open to a page and a half of neatly drawn triangles. ‘See? Geometry. I did all this last year – that’s why it didn’t take that long.’

‘All right, clever clogs.’

Lennie stuffed the file back in her bag and sat down again. Homer woke on his sofa to discover it was all a dream and shook his fist at the unfairness of the world, eliciting a flicker of a smile.

‘You talked to Adrian this morning?’

‘Yeah.’ A pause, eyes front. ‘It felt too weird, him not knowing. He really liked Auntie Rin and I didn’t know if you were going to call him.’ She raised her hands then dropped them back in her lap. ‘And I just wanted to talk to him.’

‘It’s fine. You don’t have to feel bad – you can ring him whenever you want.’

‘So can you.’ A darting look. ‘He said to say. No pressure – only if you want. He said to tell you that.’

Robin nodded. She thought of the last time she’d seen Corinna, the morning after the booze-fest. In the end, it had been a beer, hair of the dog, that got them over the hump, and one had led to another and then to talk of bad mothering – specifically, her own failure to provide Len with a father. Most of the time, she didn’t worry about it more than fifty times a day – lots of kids were in the same boat and with worse, even less present mothers – but that afternoon, with everything screwed up and dark and magnified by alcoholic remorse, she’d wondered what kind of monster she was.