Later, after lamb tagine and couscous and a bottle of hearty Malbec, the household settled down to sleep. Dora made Stella a nest out of cushions and blankets on the floor of the lounge, while Sheila showed Ali to a room upstairs which had a ceiling bedecked with Tibetan prayer flags and a wide but extremely thin sleeping mat on the floor.

‘Dora used to meditate in here,’ Sheila said. ‘Om, mani, padme, hum, all that rigmarole. Total hogwash, if you ask me, and she’s given it up now, but the flags are pretty. There’s a guest kimono on the back of the door.’

‘You think of everything,’ Ali said. ‘By the way, does Dora still drive the steam train?’

Sheila grinned, winking at her. ‘Oh, that,’ she said. ‘Not likely. We please ourselves now.’

Ali laughed, and said, ‘Well, good for you,’ and Sheila left her after another hug, another kiss, and a promise of a real talk the next day. With Sheila gone, Ali stripped down to T-shirt and knickers, lay down on the sleeping mat under the canopy of ragged flags and – feeling slightly guilty in this room once devoted to spiritualism – delved in her bag for her phone. A trapping of soulless commercialism, she thought; and yet, wasn’t it something that because of it, Daniel Lawrence had been able to take her back to the Rotherham Arts Centre, 1979? And that here in Quorn, ten thousand miles away from Edinburgh, she could listen again to the Comsat Angels, and consider her reply. Simple Minds, perhaps: the big-time, stadium version of the Comsats. Or, no, maybe a contemporary choice might be more the go; haul them out of the musical past and into the twenty-first century. No encrypted message from the 1970s, just: This is what I sometimes like to listen to, and I’m sharing it with you. Something light and lovely and melodic.

Belle and Sebastian, maybe. Yeah, Belle and Sebastian.

She opened Twitter on her phone, and did a quick search through their albums for the perfect track to strike a different tone in their fledgling playlist, and there it was, jumping straight out at her. ‘I Didn’t See It Coming’. Nice, because, well, why not state the obvious? She’d not heard from Daniel Lawrence for over half a lifetime; she’d severed their bond all those years ago, and made herself forget him by loving elsewhere, and yet now, thinking of him thinking of her … so yes, she thought; this would be her return gift, a sweet and whimsical song, with those perfect opening lines: classic Stuart Murdoch, the poet king of indie rock.

Make me dance, I want to surrender,

Your familiar arms I remember.

Daniel’s familiar arms. She played it through, for herself, and lay back down on the mat, remembering, then she swiftly copied the link, and sent it to @DanLawrenceMusic.

‘Hey, Mum?’