Imagine being that beautiful, I think. To have people in awe of you because of how you look. To have your face stared at for all the right reasons. I would like to have that. Just for one day I’d like to step out of my front door and walk around London with people looking and looking for all the right reasons. Men, women, children – they say children and babies stare at the most beautiful faces the longest; well, I’d like to enrapture a baby in a pram, for a day. And one day would be enough. Honestly.

Margot is ushered away from the minions to a waiting car, the admirers closing round her like the Red Sea.

‘She could have an awful personality,’ says Dad, when it becomes safe to proceed and we are able to walk on in the dispersing slipstream of Margot followers. ‘A black, black heart to counter-balance all that beauty.’

‘I don’t think so,’ I say, and I briefly wonder if he’s thinking of Mum, who was pretty rather than beautiful, but definitely turned out to have a heart blacker and more drug-addled than most. ‘I’ve heard she’s really nice. She’s married.’ As if that makes someone nice … It doesn’t always – remember that awful girl screaming ‘I’m married!’ at the end of Muriel’s Wedding? Poor Muriel. I can relate to her a lot. And that awful girl was a bit like Angela. Some people are so desperate to get married they’ll marry anyone, and other people, like my mother and her black heart, just can’t wait to escape marriage. Some people, like me, get neither.

Still, I bet Margot is really nice.

‘How do you feel, these days, about your mother?’ Dad asks, a couple of minutes later, once the tide has gone out on the crowd. Has he been reading my mind?

‘I feel OK,’ I say. Well, I do. My heart is stapled down where she is concerned. I know this is a protective mechanism, a defence, but it’s true. My feelings are locked against her and I like them like that. Who wants to unlock them? Wallow in pain when it is nicely filed away. I’m fine.

‘You don’t get the urge to track her down?’

‘Nope. Do you?’

‘Not at all.’

‘Do you miss her, Dad?’

I have never asked him this question. We don’t do this. I look at him, as we walk, and I wait for an answer.

‘No. I miss the old her, sometimes – I miss the old life I had with her – but I think that’s more about me before I went blind, or my teenage years or even my childhood. I miss the me I used to be, I guess, rather than her – it’s just that for quite a few years of being that old me, I was with her.’