It was at an afternoon party three years earlier, a society do at one of the big houses outside Exeter. The proceedings were dull and entirely predictable: Daddy holding court with his horsey friends, good-looking men and women whose clothes were never quite as fashionable as Daddy’s, who told dull jokes and passed silver hip flasks back and forth; and Mum trapped in an orangery or a drawing room by older women in flowery dresses who talked at her while she wilted. There were always plenty of people who wanted to hear Daddy talk about racing, or hunting, or India, and no one who cared one crumb about the things that interested Mum, like Mrs Woolf’s novels, or Matisse, or Rabindranath Tagore. On that particular afternoon, Daddy seemed to have been cornered by a tall, very thin woman with exquisitely sculpted hair and blood-red lipstick. Or perhaps he had cornered her. In any case they were standing rather close and talking very loudly. Tom wandered off. The house was old and filled with interesting things, and no one was paying any attention to him anyway, so he decided to explore. But this too became dull: all these houses seemed to have the same paintings on the walls – red-faced men in wigs, ladies with tiny mouths and almond eyes – and the same china on the mantelpieces. He decided to go outside, but as he made his way towards the front door he happened to glance into a room and saw, sitting on a chinoiserie table, his mother’s handbag: crocodile skin, liquorice-black. Strange that it should be here unattended. He decided to take it to her, but when he went to pick it up, he paused. He had been very fond of Mum’s bag when he was smaller. He had loved to rummage inside it when she was in another room, push his face right in between the gilded metal jaws and breathe in the strangely heavy air inside, the smell of powder, perfume, tobacco, lighter fuel and money. He had always taken out the cigarettes. His mother had favoured oriental cigarettes with ornate boxes. He would open the box reverently and run his fingertips over the sweetly rustling foil. Then he would lift it to his face and breathe in the cloying scent of the Turkish tobacco before putting it back, closing the handbag and slinking away.