‘Be that as it may,’ said George, ‘your mother is right. With or without her inheritance or my father’s insistence that I be educated at an actual university rather than, I don’t know, a polytechnic with notions, we still would have made a success of our lives. And I, for one, did not bring up my children never to do a day’s work, live off family money and generally be parasites on society. I’m not Prince Andrew.’

‘It’s not that I don’t want to work,’ said Elizabeth, ‘I just don’t think that it’s the right thing for me. I can’t be stifled, you know? I’m not the kind of person who can just take the Tube into some office every morning. Like, I’m really creative and individual and spiritual. I need time just to do me.’

‘To do you?’ asked George, frowning. ‘I don’t understand what that means.’

‘To do me,’ she repeated. ‘You know, you do you, and I’ll do me.’

‘Does any of this make sense to you?’ asked George, turning to his wife.

‘No, but what I want to say is this.’ Beverley folded her arms and gave her daughter the outraged stare she’d perfected over many years of feeling disparaged. ‘I find it a little offensive that you have the audacity to call yourself a creative. You don’t create anything. As a novelist, I’m the creative one in the family.’

‘You’re not a novelist. You have a ghost.’

‘I come up with the stories!’ snapped Beverley, who was highly sensitive to any accusation that her work wasn’t entirely her own.

‘Actually, now that you mention it, I’ve thought about doing some writing,’ said Elizabeth. ‘But I’m just not sure that anyone would really understand my work. I have this, you know, like, this depth?’ She paused and looked at both her parents in turn, waiting for them to agree.

‘Was that a question or a statement?’ asked George. ‘Your voice rose at the end of it and yet it didn’t seem as if you were asking us anything. Hence my confusion.’

‘I think I might make a brilliant poet,’ she said. ‘I live like a poet, don’t you think?’

‘Only in the sense that you contribute nothing to society,’ replied George.

‘Speaking as a mother,’ said Beverley, a phrase she liked to employ whenever possible, even if it had no direct connection to what she was saying, ‘there’s no money in poetry. I mean, when was the last time a poem was made into a film?’

‘It’s just … poetry really speaks to me,’ said Elizabeth.

‘I have never seen you read a book of poems in your life,’ said George. ‘I’d be less surprised if I came home to find you saying you wanted to be a kangaroo.’

‘That’s so unfair, Dad,’ said Elizabeth, banging both fists on the table, something she’d been doing since her earliest years and which had, for a long time, brought some terrific results. ‘I don’t identify as a kangaroo. But I do live for poetry. I really do. It has soul. And I’m a very soulful person. I’m really in touch with my inner child. Wilkes told me that.’