There were no postcards from the European tour. I did them myself, after a while. I went with Dad and bought a pack of blank postcards from Woolworths with my pocket money – for school, I said – and I drew a sun on the front of each, or a boat, or a beach umbrella and carefully pencilled silly things like ‘I miss you’ and ‘Having a grate time!’ on the back, in a childish approximation of our mother’s handwriting, and stuck them through our letter box in secret. For Angela.

There were no postcards, no nothing, until 1977, which was when she next manifested.

It was summer again. Our mother’s skin was tanned and she had a short dress on with weird and wonderful patterns all over it and leather flat boots that went up to her knees and had laces that criss-crossed up, like Eskimo boots. And her hair was even frizzier and she had a headband round her forehead and she looked very tired. She still laughed and smiled a lot, and she hugged us when she came in, but this time we sat on the sofa with Dad – with him in the middle and his arms round us – while she sat on a dining-room chair and stretched her Eskimo boots out in front of her.

She brought us a paper bag stuffed with Black Jacks and Fruit Salads, and she wouldn’t stop talking. She told us she had been to lots of different countries and had been to music festivals and how much fun it had been and maybe she would take us to one, too, one day. And that she missed us so much and she would come and see us the next day, definitely. And she talked on and on, and after a while Dad got up from the sofa and started folding up some laundry he’d left in a basket, although he had already folded it, and then she left and Dad shut the door with a bit of a bang and Angela started to cry.

The next evening, when we had eaten all the Black Jacks and the Fruit Salads and the paper bag was in the bin and Mum hadn’t come back again, Dad said, ‘We’ll get by,’ or something like that.

We were sitting in a huddle at the bottom of the stairs and he had one arm round each of us, like Neptune with two wriggling fishes on his knees. Angela was wearing the crown she had made at school for Easter a few months before. It had cardboard Easter eggs stuck on to each point; she’d saved it – desperate to show it to Mum – but Mum had put her brown crochet bag on it, on the hall table, when she’d come, and squashed it.