I see Philippa’s face, in my mind – in that lace-effect photo – so beautiful and now gone from this earth. I fleetingly allow my mother’s face to enter my thoughts – a flimsy, fragile image, sweet and smiling and (mistakenly) lovely, from my very early years – before banishing it. And then there’s my own face. Beauty doesn’t remain if you’ve never had it in the first place, I think. If you’ve never possessed it, you won’t get to see it fade with the years, as life and sunlight gradually take their toll. Women like the one with the radio on Primrose Hill – whose every wrinkle is another day sipping from an oversized glass of pinot grigio in a beer garden or an afternoon on a ‘hot lips’ beach towel in Benidorm, while reading a James Herbert – get to see it fade. I just see my birthmark. Every day. In the mirror.

‘Shall we?’ says Dad. He takes my arm again and we carry on walking. Birds chatter in the trees intertwined with stone. A child laughs as a father places her inside a vacant window arch. I feel entranced but disquieted in this damaged but beautiful place, this relic that stands prettier than ever for its imperfections. It’s clearly having an odd effect on me.

We walk. We walk around and around, and Dad trails his hand over the draping luxuriant ivy and we accidentally disturb a kissing couple half-concealed by foliage on a bench, and the man drops his giant pack of crisps and Dad says, ‘Whoopsie,’ and fumbles to pick them up and everyone laughs, and we walk and I describe everything to Dad and we walk some more. I think that I may never have seen this place, had Dad not shown it to me. And I would not have seen him look the way he does today. He looks almost happy, and I feel the merest glimmer of hope; a tiny shard of light piercing the darkness of our lives, that now we are out here, now we are talking, we could change our lives a little. Get closer. Throw off some of those chains that held us in The Palladian for so long. Will the list be a good thing, after all? I really don’t know, but we’ll see where it takes us, Dad and me. Maybe we could get there.

‘Hello, Bertie.’

Dad and I are standing under the engraved stone architrave of an arch and I am looking up at its intricacies as Dad explains Gothic medieval architecture to me. I freeze. I keep my eyes on the arch. The voice says, ‘Hello, Bertie,’ again.

Alberta – Albert – Bertie. It was a nickname that didn’t take long to conjure up. It was a nickname I had loved. I daren’t look behind me, where the voice is coming from. It sounds so strange to hear it, after all this time.

‘Bertie?’