Everything was always taken away from her. Within three weeks, the rich rug of education and London life was pulled from beneath her so abruptly she could hardly believe it had ever existed.

It was during a lecture on the Common Market that her personal tutor had come in at the back of the hall. She’d watched as he approached the lectern and whispered something to the Professor of Economics. Her heart sank. Even before she heard her name, she knew it was bad news.

‘Judith Harris?’ the professor said into the microphone. Heads turned and she felt a hundred pairs of eyes staring at her.

They claimed it was a suicide attempt. She couldn’t voice her own doubts about its authenticity, because of how it would look – the hard-hearted daughter who didn’t believe her own poor mother: her own poor mother who’d two months previously been abandoned by her cruel heartless husband (so it was claimed) and left alone, despairing and depressed. A neighbour had found her – in a crumpled heap at the bottom of the stairs, having ingested (so it was claimed) over thirty paracetamol. There was also a note, stating that she simply could not cope any more.

There’d been a psychiatric referral after the X-ray showed a broken hip. And it was believed Patricia would be discharged in a couple of weeks, as long as there was care for her at home. No rush for Judith to come straight back – she should take her time, her mother was being perfectly well looked after in St Luke’s hospital for now. The university understood. They said they would keep Judith’s place open or she could defer for a year if she wanted.

She waited till the following Sunday to come home. One of the tutors had a cousin in Chepstow and offered to drive her back. The students on her corridor sent her a card – one of those giant ones, with twenty-three signatures from people she barely knew, all saying how sorry they were. Judith wanted to weep at the kindness that some people in the world so naturally displayed. Why wasn’t kindness equally apportioned? she wondered. Why didn’t she have a kind mother – like Liz Kelly or Janis Lloyd?

Because she no longer had a key, she had to knock on the neighbour’s door to ask to borrow theirs – yet another humiliation inflicted by Patricia from a distance. Judith let herself into the silent house and the familiar smell hit her straight away. Warm dust and stale cooking mixed with cigarette smoke, doused in Patricia’s ubiquitous Chanel No. 5. She walked into the living room, the scene of her dramatic departure nearly three months previously. Only the heavy ticking of the mantelpiece clock was there to welcome her home.

Two days after moving back, she headed to the job centre and applied for a casual post at the Welsh Office. Judith was nothing if not practical. And her mother could be in St Luke’s for weeks.