The mum had developed a habit of calling round, she said, and then passing the evening cosily lamenting the state of affairs that had left Eve working as a waitress with a six-year-old child to keep and no man to support her. Each time, the lamentation would take a fresh shape around familiar themes, a never-ending work of embroidery on life’s misfortunes. Sometimes she would reproach herself for not forcing Eve to study hard enough at school. Or she would shift the blame over to Eve, for being – as she put it – ‘too easily distracted’. Often she would rail against the duplicitous character of Eve’s former boyfriend, who left Eve a year after Raymond was born and got on a plane to Canada (never to be heard of again) but inevitably this well-worn path carried her straight back to poor, gullible Eve, and her now legendary inability to ‘find a decent man’. Eve wasn’t even looking, so far as I could make out, although I was looking at her all the time.

‘Your father liked a drink, and God knows he was no angel,’ the mother would say. ‘But he would never have gone off and left his wife and child to fend for themselves.’ Her outrage on Eve’s behalf, enlarged by five years of repetition, had become a sort of quilt to be clutched around her at every opportunity. The trouble was, it was no comfort to Eve. Every time her mother walked in the door, she came hand in hand with the unwelcome spectre of Eve’s feckless boyfriend.

When the mother at last cheerily waved goodbye, her conscience satisfied after an evening spent helping out her unfortunate daughter, Eve would creep into bed, defeated, and pull the covers over her head. It would take a couple of days back in the restaurant before her spirits recovered.

One day, Eve was quieter than usual. She didn’t sing when she pinned up the orders, or tease me about being slow with the drinks. I asked her what was the matter, and she hesitated for a moment before telling me.

‘My mum came round last night,’ she said, ‘and it started off all right. We were watching a film on TV, and Raymond was on the floor, trying to make a mobile, shaped like a football, to hang in his room. For once it seemed as if everybody was happy.

‘Ray was making a bit of a mess with the football, and I was telling him to be careful about where he put the glue and only to use a little bit. That was what started her off: she couldn’t bloody resist it.