(In fact, Roz’s voice was going anyway. Killing it off with a nicotine addiction induced by the trauma of separation was marginally preferable to watching her reputation fall into a slow, age-related decline.)

It was Tamsin, with her own unlimited supply of anger, who finally persuaded her mother to convert grief into rage. After three months of crying and smoking, Roz put on her sequinned Louboutins and climbed up onto the roof of Bertrand’s precious Merc, with a steely Tamsin and two fearful, admiring neighbours (both women) looking on. The next day, she distributed his wine cellar amongst her friends.

During the divorce process the Daily Mail got in touch, hoping for photographs. Together, Roz and Tamsin sifted through two decades’ worth of holiday snaps to find the perfect pose: Bertrand on the beach, off-duty, paunch relaxed, clutching a can of Boddingtons. The amphitheatre of his gut. In a second photograph he and his moobs reclined on a deckchair. A third showed him sad-arsed under a beach shower, muffin-tops slopping over the waistband of his designer trunks. The Mail ran all three. The headline was ‘Conductor in the Odium’.

When Roz moved out, Tamsin moved with her. Bertrand offered to pay the rent on a separate flat, closer to the Royal College; but this, like all his attempts at rapprochement, was met by the cool, almost professional hatred that had come to define Tamsin’s relations with him.

There were no boyfriends during the Royal College years. On her one, brief visit to Roz’s therapist, in the immediate aftermath of the divorce, Tamsin had been diagnosed with ‘trust issues’. ‘That’s unoriginal,’ Tamsin had told the shrink, feeling herself equally unoriginal even as she said it: the privileged rich kid from a broken home, wisecracking back to her jaded psych. Since then, several of her friends had suggested the same thing – that her father’s behaviour made it hard for her to have any faith in men. Tamsin had another explanation: the Royal College boys simply weren’t to her taste. They were too precious, too aware of their own talent. She slept with a couple of them, but more out of a sense of obligation to a hedonistic student lifestyle than any real desire. Mostly, though, she was at home with Roz, or working at her piano.

Occasionally she still thought about the boy on the train. The faint aversion was gone. She remembered only that he had been good looking, and that there had been wine, and candlelight, and an exhilarating sense of adventure. Most of all she remembered herself, with the disconcerting feeling she was remembering someone else.

Then she graduated from the College, fell in love with a history teacher several years her senior, and forgot about Chris completely.

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