When Faye caught up with us we sat down in a glass-and-wood shelter that blocked out the wind. Ted bought dishes of cockles from a kiosk and I pulled a face at the vinegary sliver of chewy rubber and sand. They both laughed at my disgust and I got a Wall’s neapolitan ice cream instead, a crystalline pink and brown and white block wedged in a rectangular cone. My parents lit cigarettes, my mother cupping her hands round hers while Ted flicked his shiny lighter to it like a kiss. Watching him, full of pride, I wanted to tell the people who passed that he was an artist who wove dreams for ladies, using the petals of roses and the mysterious clouds of musk and amber and vetiver.

I remember driving home through the dusk. It must have been one of Ted’s prosperous times. Other families’ cars were beige or dusty black, but ours was bright yellow. It had leather seats, very dark red. ‘Ox-blood red,’ my mother said. Ted drove one-handed, with the other arm curled round the back of her seat.

Of course she was my mother. I know it, as surely as I know that Lola and Jack are mine. Whoever Audrey is, there is no blood connection between the two of us.

‘I don’t know what made me think of all that,’ I tell Paul. I am drowsy with the sudden, surprising, sexual intimacy where there was none before. Sleep is coming at me in big waves now. He strokes my hair and I fall asleep.

In the morning, I woke up with his arms still round me. It took me a few seconds to work out where I was and whose unfamiliar room I was lying in. Paul’s face was creased with sleep and his hair stuck out in rakish wings.

‘Hello,’ I said.

He sat upright and rubbed his face, and I could see full consciousness coming back. I watched to see if realisation was going to be followed by a flicker of dismay, but all I could see was happiness faintly shaded with uncertainty. ‘Are you all right with this?’ he asked, meaning the room and the bed and what had happened here.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘If it’s all right with you.’

He kissed me. ‘Better than that.’ He beamed.

We lay down again and he ran his hand down over my ribs, into the hollow of my waist, over the swell of my hips. I put my fingers to his cheekbones and the angle of his jaw, mapping his face.

We stared into each other’s eyes. I kept telling myself, Jack is at Audrey’s and Lola’s with Sam. The absence of responsibility made me feel lightweight, as if I might drift upwards away from the sheets and pillows, if I didn’t have Paul Rainbird’s arms and legs to hold me down.