When he had gone, Minnie shuffled towards her mother and hissed, ‘So, you have been speaking. Why didn’t you tell me?’

Her mother shrugged and walked off towards a side table full of silver photo frames and ornaments. She picked up a white china dog and examined it. ‘Would you look at that, just like mine.’

Minnie looked at the dog. It couldn’t have been more different to the tacky old ornament her mother was talking about. Tara’s was probably an expensive bone-china collectors’ item; her mother’s had come from the Odds ’n’ Ends shop off Kilburn High Road.

‘Well?’ Minnie whispered again, hands firmly planted on her scaly mermaid hips.

‘We’ve just been talking. It’s not your business, Minnie, that’s why I didn’t say.’

‘Not my business? I was the one who gave you her number, I was the one who said you should hear her side of the story!’

Her mother shrugged again. She picked up a framed photo of Tara with a young Quinn on her lap – they were watching a sunrise together, somewhere tropical. She looked back at Minnie, who was watching her wide-eyed, waiting for an answer.

‘I’ve got to do some things in my own way, Minnie. We’ve been talking here and there; she’s had a difficult time of it, she has.’

Minnie couldn’t understand why her mother wouldn’t have told her. Then she paused, tempering her irritation. She was glad they had been in touch. Perhaps some closure on the ‘name-stealing incident’ would smooth at least one of her mother’s jagged edges, redress her cynicism about human nature.

‘Well, what did you say that made her … ’ Minnie paused, not sure what to label Tara’s episode as. ‘ … React like that?’

‘I didn’t say anything,’ her mother said. Then, after a pause, ‘She was telling me how upset she was I didn’t call you Quinn, how bad she feels.’ She shook her head. ‘She got so worked up just thinking about back then. I said it’s only a name, isn’t it – it doesn’t matter. But then she started hyperventilating.’

Minnie laughed in disbelief – ‘only a name’. She looked at her mother as if she’d started speaking some strange Martian dialect.

‘Why you laughing?’ her mother frowned. ‘You don’t know what sets these things off. Poor woman’s traumatised – postnatal anxiety, a terrible miscarriage, husband left her high and dry. No wonder she’s a walking bag of nerves.’

Her mother picked up another frame from the collection of photos on the side table. This one showed a couple in their twenties, standing on the doorstep of the Primrose Hill house holding a baby in their arms. Quinn’s father was making a show of holding up the key for the photographer. It must have been taken when they’d first moved in.