Grey light filtered into the room, and the sound of traffic rose, the dull roar of another working day. Finally, exhausted and miserable, Isabelle slept.

Chapter 5

‘News obviously travels faster than I thought.’

‘For God’s sake, Mum. He’s practically the same age as me.’

‘He’s thirty. Eight years older than you, to be precise.’

‘And I suppose that makes all the difference.’

‘It’s just a statement of fact.’

‘Can’t you stop being a lawyer for a moment and actually talk like a human being?’

‘All right. I will. As far as I’m concerned, what I do in my private life is absolutely none of your business.’

‘But you’re my . . .’

‘As you’ve made it perfectly clear for several years that what you do in your private life is none of mine.’

This ‘discussion’ had been going on in the same vein for some twenty minutes. The moment Isabelle heard from her brother Ben that Mum had been entertaining younger men in the family home, she was round there like a shot. She also had to broach the eternal subject of money – costs for the collection were spiralling out of control. She didn’t want to piss Christine off too much – but on the other hand she had to find out if her mother had really gone off the rails and started screwing toyboys.

‘Yeah, but there’s one big difference,’ said Isabelle, sipping the coffee which her mother had just served. ‘You’re not interested in my life. You haven’t been for years.’

‘That’s absolute nonsense.’

‘Really? Well I don’t remember seeing you around the studio recently.’

‘I don’t remember being invited.’

‘Since when do you need inviting anywhere?’

‘Oh, I can just imagine the welcome I’d get if I turned up unannounced. I made that mistake once too often when you were a student.’

‘Anyway, if I do invite you to things you don’t turn up.’

‘I told you a thousand times, I couldn’t come to your graduation show because I was in the middle of an extremely important case.’

‘More important than my career, quite clearly.’

Christine held up a hand to silence the opposition – it was a technique she used to great effect in court. ‘I would not expect you to drop everything in order to come and see me at work. You can’t expect me to either.’

‘Even though you are my mother.’

‘In case you hadn’t noticed, Isabelle, I have a job.’

‘Here we go.’

‘A job, I might add, which pays for all this.’ She gestured around the kitchen, with its gleaming fittings, its hardwood work surfaces, its terracotta floor tiles. ‘Which paid for you to go through college, and which still seems to be paying for you to set up in business. If you’d like me to tell the clerks that I can only take briefs that don’t happen to clash with your diary, I’d be happy to do so – but it might lead to a slight drop in our standard of living.’