Of course, as usual Lotte sussed the truth and was upset with Tor for lying. Tor tried to explain that she can’t introduce Lotte to her family without warning her family first, but Lotte hadn’t understood, slamming the door to their bedroom. When Tor went upstairs, Lotte was red-cheeked from crying.

‘Why are you acting like I’m your nasty little secret?’ she said. ‘Is that all I am?’

‘No, Lotte, no. I will change it. I’ll make it OK.’

Lotte looked at her with watery, resentful eyes and, now, Tor tries to think of that look and of Maddy and what she said about Tor and Lotte being good together as she sits in the ‘event shelter’ that Alice has rigged up in her large garden for the family lunch, aware that the time has been ticking and she’s yet to start the conversation she knows she must have.

The tent is festooned with bunting and strings of lights and pom-pom things Alice claims she’s made out of tissue paper, but they look suspiciously shop-bought to Tor. She’s served up a lamb roast with all the fancy frills, but Tor’s only eaten the vegetables. It wouldn’t have killed her to provide a vegan option. Being vegan is hardly a ‘thing’ these days, but she’s still been made to feel as if she’s been deliberately awkward. Alice has insisted that they all wear Easter bunny ears on headbands. For fun.

There’s one of those gas-guzzling heaters that wreck the ozone and Tor’s dad huddles next to it in his bunny ears. She’s reminded of Vic warming himself next to the brazier.

Thomas and Alfie, Alice’s kids, high on the biggest haul of chocolate eggs Tor has ever seen, tear around screaming. Alice doesn’t seem to notice. She’s drinking ‘lady petrol’, as she calls it, from a giant glass, which she’s just sloshily topped up from one of the several bottles of open Chardonnay in the ice bucket on the table. Tor shifts uncomfortably in the garden chair. It’s all very well to be able to meet in person, but it was so much better on Zoom. Here, with the marquee’s plastic walls flapping in the breeze, she feels trapped.

She’s been trying to get on to the subject of Lotte with her mother all day, but it’s been impossible to get her alone. But now, as Alice takes their dirty plates, insisting that she doesn’t need help, she seizes this moment.

She smiles at her mum. She’s coming up for sixty-five, and looks-wise she could pass for a decade younger, although compared to Helga she could be decades older. She’s slim and has white hair and is wearing the same smudge of blue eyeshadow on her brown eyes that she’s been probably wearing since her twenties. Her reading glasses hang on a gold chain around her neck above her white polo neck. She’s put on one of Alice’s skiing jackets for extra warmth, which make her look bulky, when she’s slim, like Tor. She laughs indulgently as Thomas knocks into her. Tor wishes that her mother would tell the truth: that she finds the fact that Alice and Graham let their boys run riot as annoying as she does, but her mother would never commit such a gross act of betrayal. She adores being a grandparent and sometimes Tor feels her over-indulgence of the boys as a personal snub. As if she deliberately has to spoil them, because they might be the only grandchildren she ever gets at this rate.