Jasper was sitting opposite me. He and Mel kept looking at each other, as if to check one another’s reaction to what the rest of us were saying. He said suddenly, ‘Clare didn’t speak to me for two months after her mother and I split. Not a word. I thought I’d lost her for good.’

‘What happened?’ Caz asked.

‘We made it up in the end but it took time. Then she was very possessive of me for a while and hostile to my girlfriend. She went in for a couple of heavy relationships herself and they both ended badly.’

‘And now?’

‘We like each other again.’ Jasper looked less confident and more troubled than I had seen him before. ‘At least, I like her. Love her very much.’

The eerily positive picture of his family history had been painted for Mel in the early days of their relationship, I understood. Nothing was really that simple. Not with all the stepped and paralleled and severed relationships that lay behind most of us.

Mel gathered her hair in a tight fistful and held it away from her face. ‘Kids, eh?’ Her laugh was shaky.

I was thinking that we couldn’t solve one another’s problems. But we could draw comfort from comparisons, and we could get together and drink wine by candlelight. This would be my family, when even Jack and Lola had moved on and become absorbed in the joys and demands of their own families.

At that moment the phone rang and I got up to answer it.

‘Hello, Mum.’ Jack’s voice sounded small and clear. Audrey was true to her word, then.

‘Hello. Hold on for a minute, I’ll take this upstairs.’

I replaced the handset and went up one flight of stairs to the living room. As I picked up the phone again I saw how much tidier the place looked than it usually did, as if neither of my children lived with me any longer. ‘Are you there, Jack? What are you doing?’

‘Not much. We’ve been watching TV. I fed the cats and the rabbits. It’s so hot.’

‘Do you want to come home? Shall I come round and pick you up?’

‘No, Mum.’

There was a silence. I wanted to extend the conversation but I wasn’t sure what to say next. In the end I went for the obvious. ‘I miss you. Is there anything you need?’

‘I’d like my binoculars. And my bird book. It’s on my table in my room.’

‘Jack. You’re not staying there.’

‘Yes, I am.’

I bit back the sharp contradiction. If I was going to fight, I would have to use more subtle weaponry than a telephone slanging match. ‘I’ll bring them tomorrow.’

‘Thanks,’ he said, still in the same small but clear voice. He sounded older, as if he were discovering unexpected resources within himself.

‘Anything else?’

‘No. Who’s there with you?’