‘Okay, babe. Won’t be a tick. Hold your horses, Esther.’

‘Then it’s done, right?’ Sue said sweetly

‘Yes.’ Esther smiled, surrendering to the waves of determined kindness.

‘Daughter’s graduation, now that is nice,’ said Sue, ‘and with your lovely Dylan too – you must be one proud Mum.’

‘Oh, yes…’

‘Something I’m hoping to know about one day. We’re trying madly.’ She had lowered her voice and was holding up crossed fingers. ‘Dimmy hates me telling anyone. He’s starting to worry about his sperm count.’

‘Oh goodness, best of luck,’ Esther murmured, a little distractedly, because Dimitri was taking his time and Sue mentioning Dylan had given her one of the heart-lurches that had being going on since Thursday morning.

‘Not one C, but three,’ Lucas had roared down the phone. ‘That means the child hasn’t just failed to get the mediocre grades kindly demanded by the good people at UWE, he has ploughed the whole fucking lot. Quite how you managed, all these months, to dupe yourself, and me, into believing he was doing any work at all, remains a complete, bloody mystery.’

‘Blaming me solves nothing,’ Esther had countered furiously, her own upset compounded by the possibility of Dylan overhearing his father’s crushing words, and with the imminent celebration of his sister’s academic triumph somehow making everything worse. ‘Getting angry won’t help either,’ she had added miserably, having a horrible sense of being sucked back into the marital quagmire she had sought to escape. Lucas bossing everything. Rowing about Dylan. Her the good cop, him the bad. ‘I have no idea what happened either – I need to speak to Dylan. But there are re-sits, right?’

‘He will have to work his bloody socks off, padlocked to his laptop if necessary. I’ve already told him. A day off for Lily and then revision starts.’

When Esther had finally got Dylan himself on screen, hunched and wan-faced, her son’s shrugs and dejected dunnos had shredded her heart. He had done his best. He didn’t know what had gone wrong. He would do what his father said. He didn’t want to come back to London anyway. He had just started a job in a pub, which he hoped he’d be allowed to carry on with. When she’d ventured a question about Mei Lin, hoping to cheer him up, he had retorted that she was just a friend and what did that have to do with anything? A response that bore out Lily’s brusque claim to be unaware of any girlfriend. He had felt unreachable, and one of Esther’s aims for the graduation day was to find a way back to him.

When Dimitri finally bounded out of the house with a small, thin, cardboard box, Esther unceremoniously jammed it into her handbag, calling thank yous as she ran to the car.

‘Better late than late,’ he shouted cheerily.