Jomier has not met Judith’s son Tim. He forms an image of a muddled idle loser whose depression is a pretext for living on handouts from his father; and his girlfriend, Tamara, the potter, a toughie who sees a secure future in caring for the son of a rich banker. Jomier acknowledges that this image may be distorted: it is seen through the prism of a mother who feels at once guilty and jealous, exasperated and detached. Jomier wonders what Judith was like as a mother when the children were small. As a sixty-something-year-old lover she is all a sixty-something-year-old man could want: but as the parent of a toddler, an adolescent? Jomier is not so sure.

Jomier has met Judith’s daughter Ophelia. After the four years of silence, she is back on speaking terms with her mother. Jomier first met Ophelia when she turned up unexpectedly at her mother’s house in Wandsworth to find Jomier at breakfast in dressing gown and pyjamas. Judith was upstairs taking a bath. Ophelia had sat at the kitchen table with Jomier waiting for her mother to come down. ‘I heard that Mum had a new bloke,’ she says, taking a cup of coffee from Jomier. No word of thanks. She is wearing a low-cut black dress: there are mascara smudges around her eyes. She has lost the keys to her flat. She had gone out with a girlfriend and had met this man and they’d gone back to his flat and she hadn’t realised until the morning that her bag had been nicked. Jomier wonders why this divorced woman in her late thirties is picking up men in bars and getting so drunk that she does not realise that her bag has been stolen. Is this going back to square one in the dating game? Is life now a game of snakes and ladders? Or did she never grow up? She does not seem happy. Nor is she embarrassed. By the admission of a one-night stand. Or finding her mother’s lover in his pyjamas. She is only surprised by the pyjamas. ‘I’ve never seen a bloke wearing pyjamas,’ she says. ‘Not even my dad. All the ones I’ve known sleep in boxer shorts or nothing at all.’

‘It’s a generational thing,’ says Jomier.

‘Yeah, I suppose.’

Judith comes down. If she is annoyed or embarrassed by her daughter’s appearance, she does not show it. Her voice is as supple and controlled as her movements. ‘Poor darling. What a bore.’ She takes a spare set of keys to Ophelia’s flat from a bowl on the mantel and hands them to Ophelia. ‘Would you like to stay and have some breakfast?’

Ophelia shakes her head. ‘I’ll go back. I need a shower.’