Mum lives in a small, immaculate house in Cockfosters. The house is crammed full of furniture that she rescued from her marriage. My mother brought everything from our five-bedroom detached home and put it into her two-bedroom terraced house. The result is overpowering. It is impossible to walk through a room without banging your hip on a sideboard or stubbing your toe on a chair. In some rooms furniture is literally piled up on top of other bits of furniture. Chair on table, poof on chair. There are two beds in each bedroom, although no one ever stays. I wish she’d throw it all out. I wish she’d start again at Heal’s. The house is stuck in a time warp and so is Mum. When she married my father everyone commented that there was an amazing resemblance between her and Mary Quant. It was a very successful look at the time. She’s never been able to leave it behind. Over thirty-five years later she still wears her hair in a thick dark bob. She applies a home dye kit every three weeks. She wears her skirts too short and a ton of eyeliner. I find her look mildly embarrassing. Not simply because she’s unfashionable and being a trend leader is important to me, but because of what her look signifies. It is a very public statement that she has not been able to move on since my father left her. She’s never said so, but I know that she’s preserving herself in this way. She hopes that one day father will come home and the last twenty-six years will be magically erased. A modern-day Miss Haver-sham.

My mother is a tall, strong-looking woman. The height comes from her thighs, which are slightly longer than average. She’s kept her figure. The only concession to her age is that her tummy is gently rounding, comfortably protruding but certainly not huge.