Alison was a mobile hairdresser, zipping between appointments in her pastel-blue Honda Jazz, her concerned, listening face every bit as important as her skill with a comb and scissors. It was amazing what people confessed to her while she was snipping away behind them, she often said. Perhaps it was having experienced her own share of tragedy that made her a good confidante; perhaps it was her general air of non-judgemental kindness; for whatever reason, Alison knew everything there was to know within the community. If there was a story, she’d be the first to sniff it out. In another life she might have been an investigative journalist, following her nose to one juicy scoop after another.

Robyn went on shelling peas as her mum detailed tussles between neighbours regarding gigantic garden-shading Leylandii, Rita Daly’s plans for her retirement party over at The Bridge, and Josie Simpson’s new baby having been born on a pile of tea-towels on her kitchen floor, could she believe, with Anil Singh, a local delivery lad, fainting clean away when he looked through the window to see what all the shouting was about. ‘Right there by the front door!’ Alison chuckled, enjoying the story. ‘He’s had a bit of ribbing about that, by all accounts, soft idiot.’

Robyn laughed too, but she’d been pierced by a sudden flash of memory that her mind had churned up unexpectedly: of running towards her father’s legs as he came home from work, the evening sun golden behind him as he stood in the doorway, then being swung up into the air, aloft in his strong arms. ‘Daddy, my daddy!’ she had cried. ‘Robyn, my Robyn!’ he’d replied with a laugh.

You got to Robyn’s age – the wrong side of forty – and childhood memories were so much fuzzier. Had the moment really happened or was it just her imagination, hopefully proffering a fictional scene in order to appease her hunger for him? Soon after her dad had died, they’d moved out of their old house in Wolverhampton and up here to Yorkshire, but she still carried around small moments of having lived there: could remember, for example, how it felt to lie on the brown, tufty living-room carpet, how you could never get the Playmobil people to stand up properly on its uneven surface. There was that lozenge of glass in the front door with the large, rounded bobble that made people’s faces distort; she remembered bursting into tears when her grandpa had peered through it one day, because he looked all wrong. The fake coals in the fireplace – how she’d puzzled over Father Christmas being able to come down the chimney because it didn’t look like the pictures in books.