The lights are dimming. Dad and I settle back in our seats. There’s going to be a film. It is set in sunny California, where a man walks through a new museum, explaining how the architect designed it the way he did. There are interviews. There is uplifting music. It’s pretty interesting, actually. I am not bored, like Dad predicted. As the architect is interviewed about absorption acoustics and his use of voice-activated technology, I am surprised by Dad feeling for my hand and placing his own warmly on top of it, in the dark. His sturdy hand, with the neat fingernails. The hand I used to hold, crossing the road, when I was a small child and he was the one to guide me. The hand with which he used to pull the big blue hanky from his pocket when I had ice cream over my face. The hand that wiped away the few and only tears I cried following my mother leaving – tears he discovered in the airing cupboard where I had retreated for a silent sob about an hour after Angela and I had sat on his lap like wriggling fishes.

‘Thank you for coming with me,’ he whispers, and I smile, in the dark, with him holding my hand. ‘You’re a good girl.’

My heart lurches; rises then falls. At these words. These words. Dad used to say them to me when I was that little girl. He would say them when I reached up to give him a kiss on the cheek or gave him his flask of coffee when he set off for days studying to be an architect. He would say them when I fed one of the guide dogs, or brushed their vanilla coats with a special two-sided brush. He would say them when I danced on his feet; even when I was too big to do so. And he would say them when I told him my childish secrets – how I had been laughed at at school or how I had won a prize for a painting of a butterfly. He said it was good for me to share my secrets with him, that it would always make me feel better.

He hasn’t called me a ‘good girl’ for a long, long time and I am horrified that tears start to fall, in the dark of this panelled room. That they silently track through my make-up and my artfully applied edifice. That they are unstoppable.