For a while, Katrina’s father did come back to visit her occasionally. There were rare, strained Saturdays during which he’d take her out for a walk and then to eat a piece of cake in the café round the corner. But Katrina’s mother usually insisted on being present too, “to supervise”, and these outings would follow a predictable course from her mother’s sniping comments to her father’s increasingly infuriated replies, and then, if it was a good day, things would resolve into a sullen silence, or, on unluckier days, a row. Either way, Katrina often never received her piece of cake. The visits became rarer and rarer, and eventually stopped altogether. Mostly, Katrina didn’t mind.

But as the months went on, she grew more and more concerned about money. Her mother worked part-time as a receptionist at an optician’s, and she often complained that Katrina’s father didn’t send her enough money each month to supplement her income.

“If it wasn’t clear before,” she said to Katrina, “it’s certainly clear now how little he cares about his own daughter. I daresay he’s drinking it all away. Perhaps he wants us to starve.”

Katrina had never in her life gone without food, but the idea took root and panicked her. Perhaps it was only a matter of time before the money ran out. She began to overeat at mealtimes, only half aware of it, as though cramming down food for the famished months ahead.

“Darling, you’ll get fat if you carry on like this,” her mother said one day, as Katrina reached for a second helping of mashed potato. She made it sound like getting fat was a worse fate than starvation, but Katrina couldn’t stop. She developed a terror of going to her bed hungry, and started to hoard Jacob’s cream crackers in her bedroom, which she bought with her pocket money and the birthday money her grandparents sent her. She didn’t get fat, but her mother said no one would ever marry her if she went around wearing that anxious expression the whole time. “Which in some ways,” her mother added, “might be a blessing. Better a spinster than married to a man like your father.”

Katrina found out some years later that Jill had continued to see their father, right up until his death from a heart attack at the age of fifty-one, when Katrina was in her early twenties and newly engaged. It was Jill who delivered the news to her. Katrina felt a pang of sadness, but no more than that; it was difficult to feel much for someone who had essentially been a stranger.

“He was a good man,” Jill had said through her tears. “He had his troubles, but he was kind.”