A kind of semi-prohibition exists in Sweden. You must, for instance, buy your alcoholic drink from a state liquor store, System Bolaget, and it’s very expensive. Draconian penalties exist for driving with more than a tiny amount of alcohol in the blood. So while some go overboard on alcohol and shopping malls are full of winos, many Swedes are abstemious, especially in remote places, and would scarcely think of keeping liquor in the house. That was how it had been at Liv’s home. It would be an exaggeration to say she had never tasted beer or wine before she came to London but she had never touched spirits. In Jonny’s company she learned. And her evening drinking gave her ideas. Claudia and James were no more watchful of their drinks cabinet than they were of their cash. It was always replenished, the Victoria Wine company delivered weekly, and no one noticed if levels went down. In their attitude they were the reverse of those nineteenth-century householders who kept drink in a locked tantalus to protect it from the servants.

Liv found that a stiff gin or whiskey at six helped a lot in getting through the horrors of bathing Georgia, wheedling the boys into the shower and all of them to bed. On the day of the accident she projected her drinking time forward, and at three in the afternoon, when the baby had thrown her bottle at the wall and Marcus had been sick in an armchair, she helped herself to two or three half-tumblerfuls of neat vodka, more likely three.

The two of them strapped into the back of the Range Rover, she set off on her unsteady progress to the small private school in St. John’s Wood that Cyrus attended. Cyrus sniffed at her breath, called her an “alkie” and said the car “stank of booze.” He hoped she had bought it with her own money but anyway he was going to tell his father she was driving with more than the permitted level of alcohol in her blood. Georgia began to cry and Cyrus leaned over the back of his seat to slap her across the legs, while Marcus began to laugh demonically. With all this going on, the baby now screaming wildly, Liv set off for home. It was her nineteenth birthday.