‘With the reins,’ Uncle Jack told him, ‘you pretend you’re holding an ice cream cone in your hands and you don’t want to tip your ice cream over, do you?’

I smiled. ‘Still using the old ice cream tip, Jack?’

‘It’s still good advice, young lady.’ He nodded at Marlon. ‘OK, now horses move away from pressure so when you want old Maple to start walking, you just give her a gentle little nudge with your heels. She’ll feel that and she’ll know it’s time to go. No need to do it very hard. No need to hurt her. Gently, gently. Can you do that, son?’

Jack began leading Maple around the pen.

‘Don’t lean forward,’ Uncle Jack said, and my smile grew bigger because all this was exactly the advice he had given to me more than twenty years ago. ‘Don’t slouch. Sit tall and relaxed.’ Uncle Jack glanced down at the stirrups and made a slight adjustment. ‘You don’t have to stuff your feet all the way in. And when you want to stop …’

Tighten your tummy muscles, I thought. And rock back.

‘Tighten your tummy muscles,’ Uncle Jack told Marlon. ‘And rock back. Try it.’

Maple came to a gentle halt. Marlon was wide-eyed. ‘I’m doing it!’

‘Time to go home soon,’ I said. ‘Your dad will be waiting for us.’

‘Just a bit more, Mama,’ Marlon said.

Marlon had always been wary of Maple, which I saw now was my father’s fault for always being far too desperate for Marlon to share our family’s love of horses. With the best intentions in the world, my dad had forced Maple on Marlon right back from when he was a toddler, trying to get him to feed the horse carrots and chunks of bread and lumps of sugar before he could even feed himself. But it was different now that my father was away – and that is what we all said, that my dad was ‘away’, as if he was on a journey with no known return ticket in sight – and Marlon being more relaxed around Maple was only the start of it. Some ancient barrier between my mother and I seemed to be coming down at last. I looked at my mother’s fabulous face. Her hair was still blonde, with a little help once a month, the teeth in that striking face were still dazzling white as she grinned at her grandson, and the neat figure was still trim enough to turn heads when she walked into a room.

‘Mum?’

‘What?’

‘Why did you stay with Dad?’ I asked.

She turned to look at me, her smile fading.

‘Why did you stay with him when you knew he was unfaithful?’

She turned away, and I could feel the barrier coming back up.

‘Why does Christian stay with you?’ she said in that old tone of voice, the irritated, disappointed, don’t-push-me-too-far voice that I had grown up hearing. But I had thought about her question a lot.