Because work life is always so much easier than home life. Work is easier to be good at, I know; work is easier to get right. The mistakes you make at work do not echo through a lifetime, the mistakes in the professional world do not inflict deep wounds that must be carried to the grave. Even when work is tearing you apart, it is still the car crash you can walk away from.

Sometimes my father had needed a break from all that he loved and here was another reason why my mother’s love had been worn away. There had always been women, I saw now. My father had always had his women. And I suddenly knew who had told my father that James Caine was tormenting me, and I suddenly knew who the older married man was when Ginger had an affair in the difficult early years of her marriage. Her only lie to me had been – you don’t know him.

The women. My father’s women. Far too many, and far too close to home.

Two rows behind me, Ginger wept, and I wondered how long their affair had lasted for. Long enough for tears, long enough to put her off being unfaithful forever, long enough for Ginger to view infidelity as the place where marriages go to die. I understood now the curious intimacy between them, the way Ginger rushed to my father’s side at parties, and the glint in my dad’s eye – I had put it down to paternal affection! – when he looked at her. And there must have been other women. Plenty of them. And I wondered – of course I did – if my mother was sour because my father had strayed or if my father had strayed because my mother was sour.

The two Daves had been afraid that I would think they told my father about James Caine, but I knew those kind-hearted, overgrown boys would never have been able to find the words to reveal the brutal truth.

It was Ginger. She had told him. She had told my father about James Caine. She had told my dad that this business class bully was tormenting his daughter.

Ginger wept and I wished I could hold her in my arms and wipe away her tears. Did she think I was going to hate her? There are some people who are so deep inside your life that all you can ever do is love them.

I turned back to the court. Our barrister had drawn himself up straight, waiting for the hammer to fall.

The women, I thought, all those women. But in the end, there was really only one woman who owned my father’s heart.

And it wasn’t my mother. It wasn’t Ginger.

It was me. My father loved me best, and that is why he stood in that courtroom, his bald head gleaming, that is why he had done this thing.

He spoke in a strong, clear voice.