‘We want to know if we can stay up.’ Jack might not have graduated onto pro-bono work, but he’s perfectly willing to support a class action.

‘Mmm. For a bit.’

‘No, not just for a bit,’ he says with infinite patience, ‘for dinner.’

‘Not for dinner, no . . .’

‘Why not?’

‘Because it’ll be late.’

‘So . . .?’

‘So . . . you’ll be tired.’

‘Certainly won’t. Besides, we can sleep late in the morning. It’s the weekend!’

‘Jack, I said no already.’

‘But why? What possible harm can it do, what would actually happen? I mean, would the world actually come to an end?’

‘Probably not, but you’d be bad-tempered which is more or less the same thing.’

‘I wouldn’t be bad-tempered. If I slept late, I’d get the same amount of sleep.’ His voice rises imperiously as he counts hours on fingers. ‘One, two, three . . .’

There’s no arguing with either the mathematics or the logic of this, it’s just a question of who can sustain the debate the longest.

‘Maybe you’re right,’ I concede, ‘but I’d be bad-tempered if you stayed up late.’

In the end we cut a deal. The children agree to go to bed on time in return for a cup of hot chocolate with real melted chocolate pieces which they are to be allowed to drink in their bedroom. I listen to them slurping and giggling, as I stand in front of the cupboard, suddenly insecure, wondering what to wear, wondering why I care and if Duval is the kind of person who will notice anyway. In the small tin mirror I’d hung there, the face that looks back at me is pale and English, so different from Estella’s striking beauty.

He’d met her in Guanajuato. She was seventeen with slim brown legs and a mouth that didn’t quite close over her teeth. He had come to Guanajuato to look at an eighteenth-century Jesuit seminary he had heard people talk about. She was selling arts and crafts in the square. He watched her through the window as she did a little dance around her rug of dolls when she thought no one was looking. She came from a small speck of an Indian town fifteen miles to the south where at nights the streets are empty save for the dogs scavenging for rubbish.