Well, not exactly experiencing, but observing, she thought while surveying her mother and wishing she had inherited Rebecca’s dark colouring that allowed her to bask in the sun.

They had been on the patio all morning, Rebecca in a well-cut swimsuit, her long legs as trim as when she was young, Leona feeling frumpy and frowsty beside her – who wouldn’t when they had to keep their arms and legs covered lest the ultraviolet rays do their worst to the sort of skin that goes with red hair?

Nor had Leona inherited her mother’s stature. Like Marianne she was petite, as their grandmother had been, and as Leona’s daughter was.

‘You’re looking very pensive, darling,’ Rebecca said.

‘I was thinking of how the genes that run in a family make their mark, one way and another, in each succeeding generation,’ Leona summarized her thoughts.

‘But I can’t say there’s much of my family’s genes in you,’ her mother replied.

‘If you and Dad had had some more children, you might have had that pleasure,’ Leona countered.

‘Is that a rebuke because you have no brothers or sisters?’ Rebecca took off her dark glasses and said without waiting for a reply, ‘You’d better adjust that parasol, darling, or you’ll go home with a red nose.’

While doing so, Leona said, ‘I could hardly rebuke you for my being an only child, Mum, when my daughter is, too.’

Rebecca said after a pause, ‘I imagined that you and Frank wanted more children but it just didn’t happen—’

‘But you never talked to me about it, did you?’ Leona cut in. Oh, the things that had gone unsaid between Leona and her mother, and this was the least of them.

A recollection rose before her of being advised by her grandmother to make her mum feel part of her own life. It was the day Leona found out that Rebecca was an alcoholic, and had gone to unburden her distress to Sarah. Leona would not forget the shock of seeing a bottle of gin hidden behind a pile of sweaters in her mother’s wardrobe, when she was looking for a cardigan.

Rebecca was not at home. Leona had gone to the house to pick up her child, whom Bridie’s taking care of allowed her to pursue her career. Bridie, not my mother, she thought now – but when was the beautiful woman I’m looking at ever a real mother to me? It was Bridie, not she, who raised me, and I didn’t stop resenting it until I began pitying her and asking myself why.

Leona had taken Sarah’s advice, tried to make her mum feel needed, found ways of occupying her time so it would not hang so heavily on her hands, and little by little Rebecca had overcome her addiction. Leona’s asking herself the whys and wherefores, though, had reflected badly upon her father…