‘Right, so he was loaded.’

‘If he was, he didn’t share it with me. I wrote to him, a couple of times, but he never wrote back. Maybe the emails never reached him, I don’t know. God, this is turning into a complete sob story, isn’t it?’

‘Oh, hey,’ Jerome says, ‘you wouldn’t believe how many people have a sob story about the PhD they never got to do. My friend Clifton had to leave his programme in the second year because his Dad was basically drinking himself to death. It took four years for his liver to fail, and by then Cliff was completely out of the loop. His department wouldn’t take him back. He’s teaching high school now. He hates it.’

‘Actually,’ Claire says, ‘I didn’t think Mathilda was a minor work.’

‘Oh, sure. I mean, it’s still Mary Shelley.’

‘Not just that.’

‘What? You thought it was better than Frankenstein?’ He’s laughing. ‘Look, it’s fine, you do the minor works to get your funding, but this is what you gotta watch out for. It happens all the time. Grad students, the ones who don’t have the guts to write on Picasso, they still wanna argue that their guy’s just as good, even if they’re the first person ever to publish on him, even if nobody else in the whole world agrees. They think it’s that easy: you pick something small and make it big.’

Claire feels the stinging around her eyes again, the clenching in her throat. She grips the bench. ‘I’d like a glass of wine now, please.’

Morning. She phones home, and Patience says, ‘Do not worry, but your mother is feeling gloomy. She misses you, in her way.’

Claire’s head is throbbing. It takes a moment for the news to filter through. ‘She does?’

‘It is only natural. You are her daughter, after all. Perhaps now the fact of your absence is properly sinking in for her.’

‘Is she asking for me?’

‘She is watching a lot of television.’

Claire hears a jingle from the bedroom: Jerome, fastening his jeans. She feels again the pressure of his gut in the night, his damp, hairless skin. She smells her own breath and remembers eating crispy pigs’ ears in the pub.

‘Let me talk to her,’ she says.

It is not that she has never known her mother to be depressed. On the contrary: Jacqueline often has these slumps, in which she declares that life is not worth prolonging, that everything of value has already occurred. ‘Dignitas,’ she might say; or, occasionally, ‘Rat poison.’ These spells are not connected to the pain of arthritis, or the humiliations of old age, because Claire can remember a long phase of it that culminated in her coming home from school one winter’s afternoon to find the house in darkness and her mother spreadeagled on the kitchen floor, apparently unconscious, possibly even dead: when she’d held her hand above the black crescent of her mouth, she’d felt no breath. It was only when Claire was phoning 999 that Jacqueline had opened her eyes. She’d waited until Claire noticed to actually speak (‘More than two minutes that’s taken you to call an ambulance. Do you want me dead?’), then risen triumphant, energised. She’d applied more lipstick by the time help arrived. ‘You look just like Pierce Brosnan,’ Claire heard her tell the paramedic. ‘You do. Look at those eyes!’