‘Yes you do. You’re feeling emotionally vulnerable, aren’t you? We made good progress in our last session and that’s scared you. You’ve closed right up.’

Fran suddenly becomes aware of her crossed arms and ankles and slowly, deliberately, unfolds herself. ‘No I haven’t.’

‘I’ve noticed a pattern,’ Tom says. ‘Whenever I turn the conversation to your mother you try and swerve it away.’

Fran shrugs. ‘You’d swerve too if she threw hot tea at you.’

Tom doesn’t laugh. ‘Humour is also an attempt at deflection. You mentioned earlier that your mother told you you needed to get help for your grief. That this retreat was her idea and you weren’t keen. The actual phrase you used was “she bullied me into it”.’

Fran shrugs again. She can see where he’s going. He’s going to draw a parallel between her bullying mother and the bullying she suffered at school.

‘Do you find it hard to say no?’ Tom asks.

Fran grins. ‘No.’

‘Do you find it hard to say no to your mother?’

This time Fran doesn’t respond. She stares out of the window, at the trees bending and bowing in the wind.

‘Why is that?’ Tom asks. ‘Why is it so hard to say no?’

‘Imagine a glacier being dropped on you from a great height,’ Fran says, looking back at him. ‘That’s what my mother’s disapproval feels like.’

‘And yet you still want her approval?’

Fran squirms in her seat. All this emotional dissection is unbearable. ‘Perhaps. She’s a much nicer person if you do what she says.’

Tom scribbles in his notepad. ‘What’s your relationship with your father like?’

‘It’s hard to say.’

‘In what way?’

‘He’s not the most communicative of men, particularly after his stroke, but even when I was a child he wasn’t really one for expressing himself, not the emotions he deemed feminine anyway – things like warmth, compassion, sensitivity or love. When he was relaxed and happy, often after a drink at the Mess, that’s the only time he’d pull me in for a hug. But more often than not he was a force of nature, a whirlwind; the air would change in the house when he got home from work. It was interesting, and somewhat perplexing, watching the change in my mother when he’d return home. She’d shrink so far into herself it was almost as though she physically diminished. Her tone would soften and she’d become giddy and ineffectual and tasks she could do perfectly well herself suddenly become too difficult: “Henry, darling, could you open the jam?” “There’s a spider in the bedroom, could you catch it for me, please?” I was never really sure which person she was – the one before Dad came home or the one after.’