The cemetery was quiet. Penny didn’t even see the groundsman, but she didn’t know how unusual that was because she hardly ever actually came to the physical grave of her mother. Before she’d died, when she’d known that it was terminal, Hermione Bridge had pulled her daughters Penny and Clementine close to her in bed, one of them either side, and whispered, ‘You can talk to me whenever you like, even when I’m not there. Anything you say I will hear.’

Penny wondered if that’s why she spent so much time recording voice notes. Sometimes they were for the recipient, but some of them were really just prayers for mum. What must it be like to live around the corner from your mother, or pick up the phone to hear her voice whenever you wanted? Penny wondered. What a luxury, she thought. What a privilege.

‘Hi mum,’ Penny said, as she took off her scarf and used it to kneel at the side of the grave. It had a white granite headstone, engraved with the fact she’d left two beautiful daughters behind, and Penny reached out to stroke it, as if by doing so she’d wake up the spirit of her mother, who might then respond.

‘Sorry I haven’t been in a while. I guess I feel like I don’t have to come here to tell you I’m thinking of you. I think of you all the time. I really do.’ She took a breath. She hadn’t come here to keep crying. She’d come here so she’d stop.

‘I feel in a bit of a mess actually, mum. I thought you’d know what to do. There was a man, and I made it too complicated, I think, and now he’s mad at me. So, so mad.

‘There’s another man who I think could love me, but am I settling? He’s too old for me, at the very least. How do I know if it’s settling, or if it’s right? And I don’t want you to think you left behind a slutty daughter or anything, but there’s also been this other guy, too, but … well, did they have non-monogamy in your day, mum? I mean, it was the seventies, of course they did. Did you ever do that? Because this man, Thomas, he’s shown me this whole area, all things I didn’t know or hadn’t seen or had forgotten, and he makes me laugh, and he’s exciting, but he travels so much and is hardly here and when he is sometimes he doesn’t really show up. I don’t think I want to be in an open relationship. I mean – I know I don’t. I want one person, one love, one main partner who I choose and who chooses me and together we are against the world.