‘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!’

Jacqueline gets to the phone and says, ‘You have to come home. I can’t take it any more. She’s a nightmare. I think there’s something wrong with her wiring. The other day she made a batch of scones and then fed them all to the birds! Some of my best face creams are missing.’

‘She doesn’t need face cream.’

‘How do you know what she needs? We don’t know anything about her. God knows what else she’s got hidden in that suitcase. They might be selling them. They might have some sort of black market goods ring going. It’s like being in a prison, Claire. You’ve put me in prison.’

Patience retrieves the phone. ‘Claire, it is my assessment that your mother misses being able to affect you emotionally.’

‘What do you mean? She misses talking to me?’

‘It is not that she misses your company, or hearing your news. It is more that she misses being able to watch how you react to the things she says. I am not reactive. I’m like the television: it’s all one-way.’

‘But you talk to her, don’t you?’

‘Of course. We talk all the time.’

‘Do you talk about me?’

‘No.’

‘Well, there’s your answer,’ Claire says with a gruesome laugh.

‘What do you mean?’