Dad actually wasn’t a bad driver, though I wasn’t crazy about getting into cars with him because I knew how much he drank; I was always really nervous that he was going to get pulled over and breathalysed. (I worried about that more than about him having an accident.) Mum was always nervous on the road; she let other people bully her and stress her out. But Mark was a good, confident driver. He was scientific about it, like a pilot in the cockpit of a plane.

I thought, one day I want to be able to drive like that. And that was the first thing about Mark that I liked. When it came down to it, even though I had been suspicious of him to start with, I felt safe with him in a way that I had never done with Dad.

The hotel Mark had chosen to take us to was a Victorian manor house set in manicured grounds. He parked and we went inside and the maître d’ smiled at Mark like he knew him, which maybe he did. Then he smiled at us like he didn’t know us, but would really like it if we went there all the time, and showed us to a table.

The dining room was all done up like the set of a BBC period drama, with oak panelling and a chandelier and china that would probably be expensive to replace if you broke it. There weren’t all that many people there and they were mainly either old or really old. Probably the place had to charge a fortune for a cup of tea just to break even. It was grand and it was intimidating, but it wasn’t at all cool. That was the one thing that made me feel entitled to sneer at it a little, which I felt obliged to do because I hated the idea that the kind of people who usually hung out somewhere like that might feel entitled to sneer at me.

We sat down and looked at menus. Mum was nervous too: she was holding her menu in a weird way, as if she was trying to be ladylike. In a minute she’d be taking tiny little sips of tea, so as not to slurp, and picking like a bird at a few crumbs of cake, because when it came down to it there was something inelegant about eating, too.

It struck me as a drawback of going to that kind of place – you were never going to be relaxed enough to really enjoy it. But then I caught Mark’s eye and he looked anxious, as if this was a treat that he really wanted us to like and he was worried that we wouldn’t, and that made me feel bad and resolve to make the most of it.

In the end we decided to order afternoon tea for four and Mark said, not to any one of us in particular, ‘Well, I hope you’re hungry.’