‘We got married two months before you were born – those ridiculous photos, everyone trying to look happy when mostly we were just feeling numb, all of us. I was supposed to go to secretarial college; I was supposed to have a life! But my life was all mapped out for me: housewife and mother. I just plodded on, I suppose. Plodded on with my life.’

‘You’re not a plodder, though,’ I say. ‘You like running away.’

She ignores me and I almost admire her for it. ‘I wasn’t happy. I found it so hard. And then your dad – well, your dad had left school at sixteen, become a carpenter. We knew our places – we knew the life that had been set for us – but then he got this idea to go to college, to become an architect. I couldn’t see it happening, not at all, when he first talked about it, but he did it, he made it happen, and he was studying and all excited and had this future ahead of him and it was all going to be so great, except it wasn’t going to be that great for me. I was going to be the one to facilitate that marvellous career. Be behind the scenes, supporting. Doing the housewife and mother stuff. It was all going to be brilliant for him, but nothing was ever going to change for me.’

‘Same for many women all over the country in those days,’ I say, disloyal to womankind in my bitterness. ‘Supporting men in their careers. And you could still have gone to secretarial college, once we were older.’

‘Those other women knew they had married men like that. Ambitious. Successful. I had married cheeky little Vince Alberta. I thought we were going to be equal – him a working man, grafting in a job he didn’t particularly enjoy, and the same for me … at home.’ Thanks, I think. ‘Secretarial college would hardly have been the giddy heights, would it, even if I had ended up managing to go? I’ve always known my limitations. Your dad was making something of himself and I knew I never could. He was going to change. I was frightened of that, what it meant for me.’

‘You could have waited,’ I repeat. ‘Saw how things panned out.’ I get it. She was jealous of my father, of his future, his ambition and his mind – all of which she’d had no inkling of when she was screwing cheeky Vince Alberta behind the gelato shop (probably) on a Thursday afternoon. She resented his successful future – the future, ironically, he never got to have.

‘I may have waited for ever,’ she says. ‘While my parents were alive I would never have left. But they both died. They were—’

‘They died and you took your chance.’

‘I wouldn’t put it quite like that—’