‘You know, a physical relationship is not acceptable. You are making yourself vulnerable. It’s all about using this.’ She almost smiled. She placed a hand on each side of her head without actually touching it. ‘Rather than that’ – she lowered her hands from her breasts to her hips, again without touching herself – ‘to get what you need.’

There was nothing left for me to do. I knew the implications of what I had said, and that there was no recovering from it.

‘I think,’ said Maxine, ‘that this brings your interview to an end.’

When I was very little, my grandmother often chose my bedtime stories from Hilaire Belloc’s Cautionary Tales for Children. Her favourite had a huge mouthful of a title. ‘Matilda, Who Told Lies, and Was Burned to Death.’ This was probably because my grandmother hated my mother, and my mother’s name was Matilda. It didn’t occur to my grandmother that having a heroine who was my mother’s namesake would only make me love her more.

Plus, my grandmother could never convince me that Matilda was really dead. ‘It was a trick,’ I would say. ‘Matilda hid in a fireproof cellar but the story forgot to tell us.’ I didn’t confess to my grandmother that I often dreamed my parents were still alive, and it had all been a mistake. I never believed in the words ‘The End’ when my grandmother finished and snapped the book closed. I was convinced the characters continued on somewhere, and I would try to imagine the next phase of their lives for myself.

All in all, the effect of my grandmother’s cautionary tales was not what she intended. They just gave me ideas about the interesting things I could do, and alerted me to potential disasters so I could try to figure out how to avoid them, though I didn’t always succeed.

My grandmother was forever muttering about listeners at keyholes being vexed, and eavesdroppers never hearing good of themselves. ‘That is what you must reflect upon, Holly,’ she would say.

The best response to this, like most of the things my grandmother said, was the word, ‘Yes,’ usually accompanied by a solemn nod. But in truth, the only thing I reflected upon was how to avoid detection.

Soon after they moved into the house next door, Peggy discovered me lying like a tiger along a high branch of my grandmother’s apple tree. It was the end of summer, and I was watching Peggy play with Milly on the other side of the fence that ran between our houses, while James manned the barbeque.