‘No,’ says Angela. ‘She came back again in nineteen ninety. I was eighteen. You and Dad were out – a doctor’s appointment or something. I was so surprised to see her. I opened the door and she was wearing normal clothes, for once. Jeans and a lilac T-shirt with buttons down the front and a pair of trainers, but she looked awful. Like, worse than she ever had. She was, what, thirty-six? But she looked about seventy. She had massive bags under the eyes and her face was all wrinkly and she looked drawn and ill. I think I actually winced. And she made no sense whatsoever – you know what she was like. Muttered something about the ferry, you know, back to Sweden – “the boat” she kept calling it, and giggling – and about money and did I have any. In fact, that’s pretty much all she kept saying – did I have any money? Did I have any money? – and when I said “no” she got angry and she whacked her own head on the door frame and she called me a bitch.’ There’s a huge sigh down the line, all the way from Canada and my sister. ‘She actually called me a bitch, Prue. And I was frightened. So, I shut the door on her, and I watched from the window as she walked away, and I knew then that the mother she should have been was never coming back. That any dream I’d had of that was gone. So, I might as well be gone too.’

‘Bloody hell, Angela! Why didn’t you tell us she’d come again?’

‘What was the point? I didn’t even want to talk about it. All I knew was I didn’t want to be in London when she next came for a pathetic, self-pitying visit. That I had to make sure I wasn’t there. That I was a long long way away. So, yes, I did go to that college for the foreign students. I was looking for an escape route. And then I found Warren. And a career. I was aimless in London, Prue. I’d scraped through my A levels but I had no clue what to do next. I had no direction, no drive.’

Angela and I have never talked about this stuff before. How directionless we were. How we drifted through school with no purpose. Angela’s escape finally gave her one, while I continued drifting in a boat with no oars and no rudder, apart from my truncated career at the conference centre, where I was eventually kicked overboard. She didn’t have to go quite so far, but that’s Angela for you. And I realize she had to go; that I had been blind to just how badly our life in The Palladian – in London – had affected her.