Nina hated to see Bea burdened by adult worries. Normally so calm, she’d turned into a ball of tension. She’d just started at Trinity and was learning to make her way in life. She should be out having a good time, making friends and falling in love, not sitting at home, listening to old Pearl Jam songs and radiating resentment. When Bea announced she was off to London to see her sister, Nina didn’t protest. Although she could picture the two fulminating about the general uselessness of their parents, she hoped some space would help them to adapt.

At the end of the summer, Alannah had revealed that she wasn’t coming home. Not yet anyway. ‘I’m not quitting college,’ she’d insisted. ‘I’m taking a year out to make the most of an opportunity.’ She was working as a minimum-wage gofer in a PR company. ‘Interning’, she called it. If you asked Nina, the Americanism was a distraction. ‘It was called exploitation in my day,’ she said. Alannah’s stay in London was facilitated by the generosity of a friend’s aunt, who was charging her a very low rent, and by a substantial allowance from home. None of this sat well with Nina, who wanted her daughter to come back and complete her degree. ‘London will still be there in a year’s time,’ she said. If she was being honest, her irritation was part-fuelled by envy. Who wouldn’t want to be twenty-one and living it up in London, your story yet to be written? She wondered if there was something sinful about envying her daughter.

Nina would have to talk to her mother. Her parents needed to be prepared for the end of her marriage. Not yet, though. At the moment, she wouldn’t be able to cope with her father’s disappointment. What would she tell them? Obviously she would mention the affair. But the end of her marriage was more complicated than that. Everything Nina and Julian would ever have to say to each other had already been said.

She felt bad about her parents. In her twenties, she’d pictured herself as a conscientious, capable daughter; someone who would look after her mam and dad in their old age. Yet here she was, as useless and ill-at-ease as she’d been in her teens.