Clemmie came across her with her head in her hands one evening, and pulled at her roughly, sharp little fingers digging into her flesh.

‘Don’t!’ she hissed into her mother’s face, her nostrils flared and her eyes glinting.

‘Don’t what?’ asked Irene.

‘Don’t look like that. Smile! Not like that, smile properly, like you used to!’

Aggie every so often asked for Frankie to kiss her goodnight too. She said that Frankie never got angry with her, and smelt of roses and marshmallows.

At last she met up with Karen. At the restaurant she ordered cold soup, pasta and a carafe of rough house red, which at the first sip went straight to her head so that the room was full of soft edges and queasily shifting light, and she was soon saying things to Karen that she hadn’t even known she’d been thinking. Words bubbled up.

‘Was I happy with Adrian?’ she asked, lowering her spoon into the minty green sludge of the soup. ‘I thought I was. If anyone had asked me, I think I would have said that I was. I would have said that, like in all marriages, we’d been through some bad times. But how do you know if you’re happy? You stop asking yourself things like that after a bit, don’t you? You just say: this is what I’ve got. Especially after you’ve had children together. You don’t even think to yourself about what you want from life, or stand back to look at it. Not properly you don’t; or I didn’t, anyway. Weird, eh, not even to know if you’re happy with someone. How did I get to be like that? I used to be so clear about what I wanted from life.’

She stopped for breath; picked up her wine and took a deep gulp. She wanted to get drunk, to weep and be hugged better. Wanted to shout and giggle. Wanted to run through the streets in the rain.

‘Well,’ began Karen, laying down her fork.