My mother had left notes to herself among the pages of his book and I found these sometimes as revealing as the paintings themselves. She had marked one page in the book that had a painting called, Half Siena, Half Paris. It had obviously resonated with her and reminded her of Singapore, with its sprawling mix of races and cultures.

The painting was of a view, as if looking down upon a city full of tall buildings of differing architecture; a strange, uncaptured image of two cities in one place. The text suggested that the painting was meant to convey an impression of a place that never was, yet contained some source and emotion from both cities.

I stared down at tall buildings jammed together, all human nature behind a myriad of windows laid bare, filling the time and space.

I felt, without seeing the original painting or a large print, the aching loneliness of a polyglot of human beings milling round in Hundertwasser’s make-believe city, just missing something essential which might have connected them as they lived crammed and hemmed-in without space to breathe. Lonely, like inhabitants living behind any façade, in any city, anywhere in the world.

But who was I to interpret this guy’s work. What did I know?

Fleur had scribbled on a file card: ‘A multi layer of images. Mixed lives, different cultures; giving permission for schizophrenic mingling of one person living many lives. All there in one place, a hundred cities, all the lives you’ve ever led in one lifetime. All the different people you’ve been. And how strange it would be, to hear yourself described by other people – to this person, you – who have little idea who you truly are at all, yet sometimes know too well the way you are perceived. I see myself too clearly through my daughter’s eyes – the dart of hurt – because I know a ring of truth. This shallow self I was. Yet I have become wise enough to know I will never shift her image of me. It is set in Singapore and the unchanging landscape of her childhood. There it is, literally written in blood; the mother I was, not the woman I became or the woman I am now.’

My hands shook as I read my mother’s words. She was right: I didn’t know her any more. I had taken trouble not to and now it might be too late. Who on earth was she, this middle-aged woman reading Hundertwasser and taking a degree?

Not my mother. Not Fergus’s wife, that’s for sure. So who had evolved from a decade of playing the pretty little woman needing a big strong man? And how had it happened without me noticing? The answer was clear enough: my total self-absorption and years of studied disinterest.

Did it always take tragedy to know the thing you had so carelessly lost? All my life I had carried the suspicion, no, the knowledge, that her affair with Fergus had caused my father’s death that dreadful night of my childhood. This I had pieced together over the years, and from listening when I shouldn’t to my grandmother, Laura. I had carried this information like a little stick I never mentioned. And boy, had I used it.