Growing up with two mothers and no father was rarer in Nick’s childhood than it had subsequently become. To him it was just normality, of course, though some of the other boys at his school hadn’t seen it that way. But Caro and April had never mollycoddled him. In fact, April used to joke that if there wasn’t a father in his life at least there was a father figure – her. Looking back from the perspective of early middle age at the often chaotic nature of family life chez Caro and April, Nick couldn’t help being surprised by how they’d somehow managed to be passably good parents.

Many of the friends who would be at the lunch party were fellow veterans of the Greenham Common women-only anti-cruise missile protests of the 1980s. In Nick’s childhood, Caro and April had virtually taken turns being arrested for trying to scale the fence at the RAF base. He supposed he should have been grateful one of them always stayed home to look after him.

Feminism, pacifism and socialism, augmented in many cases by vegetarianism and more recently veganism, were the elements that bound this now ageing sisterhood together. Nick was tolerated despite being a man, an unapologetic meat-eater and a floating voter largely because of sentimental memories of him as a little boy. One of the protests had involved hanging photographs of the women’s children on the fence and, as one of those children, Nick enjoyed a special status.

It was a fine morning, so Nick decided to walk. He headed up through Greenwich Park, stopped for coffee in Blackheath, then ambled on south-west through Lewisham. As he approached Caro and April’s house – just April’s now, of course – he wondered, not for the first time, how they’d managed to handle money so badly over the years that they’d drifted steadily down the London property ladder, from a gabled semi in Dulwich that was the site of his earliest memories to a large but comfortless house not quite far enough west of the centre of Catford to be called Forest Hill. ‘Because money was never our thing,’ Caro would have told him. And there was certainly no disputing that.

When he arrived, the party was already underway. April, who’d lost weight during Caro’s illness, was beginning to put some back on. She was more like the April Nick always pictured in his mind’s eye: fleshy, flush-cheeked and sparkling-eyed, with short blonde-grey hair and a ready grin. The colour in her cheeks was partly due, he suspected, to the amount of gin she’d already drunk.

‘God, Nicky,’ she confided as they hugged, ‘I had a good cry this morning thinking about times like this in the past when Caro was the life and soul of the party. But it’s onwards and upwards, so have a drink, socialize and stay cheerful. That’s an order, OK?’