As for Becks, she spent her time in an increasing tizzy of rising irritation. This was because, as far as she was concerned, she’d just had an amazing adventure, and yet no one in her house seemed at all interested in hearing about it. Colin had listened carefully as she’d explained about seeing Imam Latif, and how he’d told her the story of Iqbal Kassam possibly being cheated out of an inheritance from his neighbour. Once she’d finished, Colin told Becks she shouldn’t gossip when she was out and about in a way that made Becks realise that he hadn’t really been listening at all. As for her son Sam, he was so wrapped up in his own fourteen-year-old life that Becks didn’t even bother telling him. And while she knew her daughter Chloe would have loved to hear about her escapades, they were currently refusing to talk to each other. This was because, the night before the funeral, Becks had caught Chloe slipping out of the house to visit her boyfriend, a nice boy called Jack, but what put Becks on the warpath was the discovery that her daughter had a bottle of gin in her bag. Becks had shouted at Chloe at the time, what sort of sixteen-year-old girl goes to see her boyfriend late at night with a bottle of gin?

The answer, of course, was: Becks. After all, Chloe got her transgressive side from someone, and it certainly wasn’t Colin. In fact, Becks had a memory of stealing an old bottle of Cointreau from her mother when she was eleven years old, drinking it in a field with her best friend while smoking her mum’s cigarettes. But that was the childhood version of Becks. The one who was daring, who didn’t give a stuff about rules.

What perhaps spiked Becks’ irritation the most was the realisation that she was as culpable as anyone else for her lack of status within her family. When she married, she couldn’t wait to put on her wedding ring and take her husband’s name. But all these years later, without even her own name to cling to, she felt rudderless, cast adrift.

When Becks’ phone rang, she was in the process of making mayonnaise with a hand whisk. She had a perfectly good food mixer that could have done the job in seconds. In fact, she lived next to any number of shops that would have sold her organic artisanal mayonnaise over the counter. But, in the absence of knowing quite what she was doing with her life, Becks clung to the only truth she knew: she was a housewife, and as such, her only sanity was to be the best housewife there’d ever been. Ergo, the hand whisk.

Her heart jumped as she saw the display name on her phone, and she answered the call gladly.