He was right. I would have liked an easygoing all-rounder, like Caz’s boys – anyone would. But if he had been a rebel, like Lola or even worse, I would have known how to deal with it. I thought I could have handled almost any other problem, but Jack’s hostility entirely baffled me. I would have loved the attention and affection that I tried so fruitlessly to bestow on him. But I was also aware that he was growing up with only one parent at home and in that I had replicated my childhood for my children even though it was the very thing I had wanted to save them from.

I tightened my hands on the wheel, and the sweat from my palms made it slippery. ‘Do you want to go and live with your dad?’ I asked.

I hated the idea, but if that was what Jack really wanted, I resolved, I’d go along with it. Whether Tony and Suzy would, though, was another matter.

‘No,’ Jack said scornfully. ‘I want a family, not to have to live with one half or the other.’

‘We have talked about this, haven’t we? Tony and I don’t live together, but it doesn’t mean we don’t love you, Jack. And you’re not the only child in your position. Plenty of kids have divorced parents.’

The waves of his anger were subsiding. ‘Yeah, yeah,’ he sneered, which was no more than my platitudinous speech deserved.

I tried yet another line. ‘I know I don’t understand about birds. I wish I did. But you know other people who do, don’t you? You go to Bird Club now.’

A black BMW convertible with the top down swept past and the blast of music buffeted my car.

‘Yeah,’ Jack flatly agreed. ‘I go to Bird Club.’

‘Let’s have lunch,’ Mel suggested on the phone a few days after this. I had missed her so much that just the sound of her voice made me smile. I agreed immediately and told Penny that I would probably be out for a couple of hours. She nodded without putting down her hammer and I glanced across the yard to the closed back door of the house. Evelyn and Cassie were nowhere to be seen. The next Saturday was the night of Jerry’s party.

I saw Mel stepping out of a taxi as I walked towards the Thai café where we’d arranged to meet. She was laughing as she leaned in through the window to pay the driver and vitality seemed to bleed out of her and blur a little Mel-shaped envelope of air around her. I felt half as alive by comparison.