She’d eventually felt glad too. When she finally did have sex for the first time, four months later, it had been with a kind, gentle boy from her high school. They’d been dating for six weeks. Jeannie guessed immediately, somehow, when Eliza came home from a sleepover at his house.

‘Did you use protection?’

‘Mum!’ she’d said. Yes, she admitted.

‘And did you enjoy it?’

‘Mum!’ Yes, she admitted.

‘My little girl is a woman,’ Jeannie said.

‘Mum!’

‘Sorry. My tall beautiful girl is a woman.’

You were so lucky, Rose had said, when they swapped stories early in their friendship. She’d come from a large Catholic family. Sex had been taboo. Her brothers had all been told to ‘keep it in their pockets’ and there had been the assumption that the girls simply weren’t interested in sex.

In her hotel room, Eliza made a decision. She wouldn’t wait for Olivia to introduce them again. She’d go and find Alex now. Get it over and done with. She imagined what her mother would say. She could almost hear her voice.

That’s my girl.

Two floors down, at the desk in her office, Olivia was on the phone to Maxie.

‘She’s as gorgeous as ever. A bit frazzled from the flight, and she still seems to be dressed in Gillian’s cast-offs, but she’s here and that’s all that counts.’

‘Has she asked you any questions about Jeannie yet? About her father? Any of it?’

‘Maxie, she’s hardly off the plane. She also wants to wait until it’s the three of us, remember?’

‘I’m feeling sick every time I think about it.’

‘Can you please stop being so dramatic?’

‘You know I can’t. I always ring her on a Monday, around now. Will she be suspicious if I don’t?’

‘Maybe. Ring her now, before we go to dinner. And remember —’

‘Do some acting? Seriously, Liv, what do you think I’ve been doing for the past twenty years?’

‘Sorry. Break a leg.’

‘Now you’re being mean.’

Eliza was leaving her room when her mobile rang. Maxie calling. She answered, remembering in time that Maxie thought she was still in Melbourne.

‘Good morning!’ she said, looking through her bedroom window at the darkening Edinburgh sky. ‘I could set my watch by you, couldn’t I?’

‘I’ve always been your favourite godmother, haven’t I? Olivia is more the bossy but boring type. I’m the exciting yet still reliable one.’

‘Exactly,’ she said, sitting down on the bed. ‘How are you, how is Hazel, how is work?’

Maxie told her a story or two from the set, spoke about a good film she and Hazel had seen, passed on some salacious gossip about an American actor who was appearing in a West End show a friend of Hazel’s was working on. ‘And how are you, darling? All good at work? How is the demure Gillian?’

‘Same as usual,’ Eliza said.

‘And the Melbourne weather?’

‘As contrary as ever,’ she said.

After a few more minutes, they ended their conversation as they always did.