Emmy pretends to weigh up the offer but, God knows, she can recognize a good deal when it’s on the table. ‘Okay.’ She stretches out her arms to be picked up and I pull her onto my lap.

‘It’s just that I’m tired,’ she whispers.

‘I know.’ This is Emmy’s standard apology and I accept it with good grace. I try to set her on the ground, but she clings, rubbery-legged, around my hips.

‘Mummy Mummy wait there’s something else. I just have to ask you a question.’

‘Okay.’

‘Because it makes me scared in my body and I don’t know if it’s true and I don’t want you to just say it’s okay I want to know the truth because it really makes me sad.’

When she’s upset or tired, Emmy talks like this; very long sentences without punctuation, all delivered with great seriousness and sense of urgency in a desperate pleading voice that flips my heart over. I steel myself for something apocalyptic. Has Emmy, with her child’s extra-sensory perception, picked up that something is a little out of kilter with her parents’ marriage? Has she decided after careful deliberation that living 7,000 miles apart is not exactly a normal state of affairs for your average nuclear family? And if so – then how to answer? Questions about God, sex and lesbians, I can field without difficulty, but justifying the big D, for any parent, remains the final frontier.

‘Look, she’s gone,’ was how my own father chose to put it that first evening as he placed a plate of beans on toast in front of me. ‘And she’s not coming back.’

‘Never?’ Only later did it occur to me that this was an event way out of the ordinary.

‘I’m sorry, Alice,’ he said. ‘But I’m going to look after you now and I’m going to do everything just as well as your mother.’

‘Okay,’ I said. And suggested he start by heating up my beans.

I look into Emmy’s trusting face, knowing that whatever she asks, I will inevitably fail her. She glances nervously at her brother, then yanks my ear towards her mouth.

‘Is it true that Jack is really a vampire?’ she whispers. ‘Because he says he is and he swears he is and if he IS a vampire AND he sucks my blood then I will have to be a vampire as well and I don’t want to be a vampire because I don’t want to live on blood.’

I hold her close to me while she cries, rolling my eyes at Jack over her shoulder, then I hoist her onto my back and walk on.