‘Yes, please,’ she says, clipped and affronted. ‘Warren has bought a new sailboat. I’m hoping Dad might love to hear all about it.’

I imagine Angela’s neat, backward-slanting handwriting on an airmail envelope. Her fingerprint on the licked stamp to Sweden. A hopeful missive forwarded by cousin Torge and delivered to the mailbox of a tiny apartment above a sweet Swedish bakery. A shard from the past piercing Mum’s present like a poisoned dart piercing a balloon.

‘Angela,’ I say to Dad.

‘Thanks, Prue.’

I return to my chair and look across to the window where dusk is now descending over London. Things are changing. Dad and I go out together now. Angela has written to our mother. And I sort of have a man called Salvi.

I check my mobile but there is nothing from him. Nothing at all, and, although it’s only been a few hours since I was with him, I have the sudden gripping, choking fear I may never hear from him again. That, like my mother, he is gone. This is how it’s going to be with him, I realize. Never knowing what’s going to happen. He has set a spell into suspension – of black satin sheets and fast cars and the promise of something – a spell that hangs in the night; a tangible portent, a beautiful destiny. And if it is my destiny then it is one edged in both dark and light, as this is how I feel when I am with him – picked up and laid down; illuminated then plunged into darkness.

He’s part of it all, isn’t he? The darkness of my life that was set in motion on a night over thirty years ago – a night of brash lights and jangled music and all the fun of the fair – when I was a teenage hopeful: of being loved, of being looked at with desire, of being part of something, like everyone else. But I am not like everyone else. I am a motherless paper-bag girl, a girl not to be loved but chosen as a plaything, a booty call. Salvi wants me. I hope. I want him to want me. He’s my choice when not much else has been in my life.

I check my phone again. There is nothing.

CHAPTER 33

It’s 9.30 am and Dad and I are at Central Hall, Westminster. We’re sitting second row from the back in the George Thomas room, which boasts lemon-and-white panelled walls, a large empty fireplace, several chandeliers, a sumptuous blue carpet and, currently, lots of very intelligent-looking, earnest architect types. Dad is opening a packet of Fruit Pastilles. I am looking at a screen that says, ‘Architects, Bring Me Your Ears’.