Fat chance.

Still, I did get something out of it his visit. Consistency. Dad behaved exactly as I would have anticipated, if I hadn’t allowed myself to hope for something more. In the end, the wild card was Mark. It was the first time I saw how ruthless he could be, and how much he liked to win.

The evening with Dad started badly. Surprise, surprise, he was late. The worst thing about that was how patiently and uncomplainingly Ellie waited for him, sitting right by the kitchen window where she could keep an eye on the street and getting paler and sadder as time went by. I sat it out in our bedroom, where at least she wasn’t right under my nose. It wound me up too much to see her like that, all the more so because it was just something else I couldn’t do anything about.

When it got to half-seven I couldn’t wait any longer. I went into the kitchen, where Mum was washing up her dinner for one and slapping plates in the drainer as if she didn’t care if they broke. Ellie was still sitting by the window with one of the red-backed books open in her lap, looking as forlorn and starved as an orphan.

I put a couple of pieces of bread in the toaster. ‘Have a bit of this, if you want, Ellie. You look as if you’re about to pass out.’

‘You’ll spoil your appetite,’ she said primly.

And then we all heard a car outside.

Ellie got up straight away and dashed over to the window and looked down, and said – as if this was a triumph – ‘It’s him!’

Mum and I exchanged glances. Mum grimaced. I rolled my eyes. Ellie had already gone, hurrying down to get into the taxi – Dad never drove us any more, Mum had put a stop to that.

‘Some toast there if you want it,’ I said to Mum.

‘Take care,’ she said. ‘Remember what we talked about.’

‘He won’t make any trouble,’ I said. ‘Or at least no more than usual.’ And then I hurried downstairs too.

We went to a Portuguese place in Kingston. It wasn’t as posh as the hotel Mark had taken us to, but it was nice – probably nicer than Dad could really afford. He always tried to take us somewhere different; Thai, Chinese, Indian, whatever. This place specialised in steak, which Dad liked. He was a red-meat, red-wine kind of guy. Actually, he was a beer and whisky kind of guy, too. He didn’t discriminate.

‘I’m thinking of going vegan,’ I told Dad as we studied the menus.

Dad raised an eyebrow and looked at me pretty much the way the snake might have looked at Eve in the garden of Eden if the snake was a middle-aged alcoholic and Eve was his teenage daughter. Like, Who are you trying to kid, coming over all virtuous? Who do you think you are?

‘What does your mother think of that?’