‘Where shall I put this?’ I asked, holding up a bottle of champagne, keen that it should be noticed. I had not dared to buy anything cheaper than thirty pounds, though I had agonized over the purchase. It seemed to me that these were the sort of people who would at least recognize expensive alcohol, and appreciate the gesture if not the taste. I was a little perturbed when she indicated the table without so much as a glance at the label, and walked back into her bedroom, closing the door. I looked around the room: it was friendly-filthy like a teenage boy’s, with dirty sports shoes, sweat bands, tennis rackets, balled-up jeans, CDs and jewellery, fake and real, covering every surface. Only the smell of the place betrayed the sex of the occupant: the faint citrus scent of her was everywhere. It amazed me that Jessica could conjure up her perfect appearance from this chaos. I lifted a sheaf of notes off an armchair and took a seat.

Francis bounded in a few minutes later to tell us that the party was waiting down by the Mill.

‘And would you look at this?’ he was saying, waving a letter backwards and forwards. ‘My father has remembered my birthday! On Commons headed notepaper, no less.’

The girls came out of the bedroom. Jessica was casually perfect in black jeans and a figure-hugging silk top that looped around the back of her long neck. Lisa seemed a little discordant next to her in a rather ugly, though no doubt expensive, sweat jacket sewn with innumerable beads and scrawled with graffiti. The letter Francis brandished was a single typewritten sheet with a governmental letterhead and a handwritten scrawl at the bottom. He did not seem to expect any present from his father, and I suppose that given the amount of money he received from him weekly it would not have been appropriate. It was touching, the way he tried to conceal his joy from us in parody. You could see that behind his wry smile there was real elation tugging on the corners of his lips, and his eyes sparkled, not with the brilliance of his own fooling, but with excitement.

‘What does it say?’ Jessica asked.

‘Yeah, go on, read it to us, Francis, please,’ Lisa said, rolling her eyes, playing up to Francis’s pretence of scorn.

‘It says, “To my firstborn on the occasion of his twentieth birthday . . .”’ His voice deepened, and he rounded and polished his public school vowels into what I guessed must be an imitation of his father.

‘At least he knows how old you are,’ Jessica interjected. Francis held up the palm of his hand for silence.

‘“You are nearing the age of manhood . . .” How kind of him to say so! He’s called me many things, but never a man.’ He looked more closely at the letter, reading it for the second time, and he seemed suddenly to sag a little, as though the breath had gone out of him. ‘So very kind . . .’ he repeated quietly.