The room was a mess. Overflowing ashtrays and empty lager cans. ‘Looks like you’ve had a bit of a party,’ said Gareth, and he started clearing up as Patricia settled herself on the settee. She couldn’t have been less pleased to see them.

‘Jack sends his love,’ Judith said. The mention of her boy was always guaranteed to warm even Patricia’s ice-cold cockles.

‘He not with you then?’

‘No, the thing is he—’ Judith started to say, but Gareth got in before her.

‘He’s got rugby,’ he interrupted, niftily heading off a discussion about Jack’s recent revelation. ‘Shall I put the kettle on?’

These visits were always the same. Duty visits, Gareth called them. Judith found her mother’s attitude to life to be unrelentingly negative. Two years previously, when Patricia had turned sixty-five, they’d sorted out a bus pass for her. She’d never used it once. And whenever they called, they always ran through exactly the same conversation:

How is your hip? Makes my life a living hell.

How is work? They pay me a pittance and I work like a dog. I’m sixty-seven, for Christ’s sake.

How’s *insert name*? He’s gone back to his wife, or Christ knows, the man’s a fool.

She never asked them anything about their lives except for Jack, the one-who-could-do-no-wrong.

Judith watched as Patricia hauled herself up on to her feet, noticing a tomato-ketchup stain on her mother’s dressing gown.

Reaching over to the mantelpiece, Patricia took out two crisp twenty-pound notes. ‘Give this to my boy,’ she said. ‘Tell him to come and see his Nana.’

‘Will do. Thanks.’ Judith glanced at the clock. ‘We better get going, the service starts in half an hour.’

And then, without warning, Patricia went off script. ‘So you’re going to Cyprus next week, I hear?’

‘Er, yeah … did Jack tell you?’ Judith was thrown by this, because she made a point of never mentioning her father to her mother, and although Patricia was aware of their trips to Kakopetria, it was never ever discussed.

‘No. George Harris did.’ On the very rare occasions when Patricia uttered the name of her ex-husband, it was always in full.

Judith couldn’t believe what she was hearing. ‘Really?’

Patricia ignored her as she rifled in the drawer of her tiny bureau and took out a sealed envelope. ‘He wants this. Give it to him when you see him. And tell him he owes me ninety pound.’

All the way to the church, Judith wondered what on earth her father could possibly have asked her mother to give him. ‘I don’t get it, Gar. They’ve not been in touch for years!’

‘You’re not thinking of looking inside it, are you?’ asked Gareth, his voice loaded with caution.

‘Well, I could steam it open,’ she said.

‘No, Jude. It’s private.’

‘You’re too honest for your own good,’ she said.

They arrived at St Theodore’s, Judith having to put the whole thing out of her mind as they were swept up in the general mêlée of christening guests. Hanging around the church door and patently not dressed for the service were a few familiar faces from her schooldays. Camera phones at the ready, they appeared to have come to watch. Judith guessed that, being local GPs, Catrin and Sol were local celebrities of sorts. She recognized Becky Williams amongst the throng – still as mouthy as she was when she was fourteen. She had a tattoo on her arm that read Serenity in a Gothic font, and Judith contemplated the different paths their lives had all taken. ‘What a sight!’ she whispered to Gareth, who told her she was being a snob.