There was a racket coming from the television room and it sounded like all those currently domiciled in the house –Mum, Dad, Helen and Anna – were actually present. Helen, at twenty-five, still lived at home because of her on-off relationship with gainful employment – she’s had many career changes. Two or three years were spent wasting time at university, and after a spell of unemployment she’d tried to be an air hostess, but couldn’t manage to be pleasant enough. (‘Stop ringing that fucking call-bell, I heard you the first time,’ was, I believe, the sentence that ended her high-flying career.) More unemployment followed, then she did an expensive course as a make-up artist. She’d hoped to work in theatre and film, but instead ended up doing wedding after wedding after wedding – mostly the daughters of my parents’ friends. But Mum’s efforts to drum up work for Helen weren’t appreciated and, in high dudgeon, Mum told me that Helen had sworn that if she ever had to make up another six-year-old flower-girl she’d gouge her eyes out with her taupe eyeliner. (It wasn’t clear whether she was talking about her own eyes or the flower-girl’s.)

Helen’s problem is that she’s burdened with high intelligence coupled with an unfeasibly short attention span, and she has yet to find her true calling.

Unlike Anna, who has yet to find any calling, true or otherwise. She’s resisted any encouragement to embark on a career path and has eked out a living waitressing, bartending and reading tarot cards. Never for any sustained period, mind; her CV is probably as long as War and Peace. Until she and her ex-boyfriend, Shane, split up they’d lived a hand-to-mouth, free-spirited existence. They were the type who’d pop out for ten minutes to buy a KitKat and the next time you’d hear from them they’d be in Istanbul, working in a tannery. Their motto was ‘God will provide,’ and even if God wouldn’t, the dole did. I’d envied them their devil-may-care existence. Actually, that’s a complete lie. I’d have hated it – the insecurity, never knowing if you could eat, buy exfoliator, that sort of thing.

The thing about Anna is that she can be acutely, almost shockingly perceptive, but she’s not great on practical things. Like remembering to get dressed before leaving the house. There was a time when we felt her sweet, absent nature was down to her fondness for recreational drugs, but she knocked that on the head about four years ago, around the same time that Rachel did. And although she’s possibly a little more lucid than she used to be, I couldn’t say for sure.

She’d moved back in with my parents a few months before, when she’d broken up with Shane – though she hadn’t been given the same sort of grief as I expected to get. One, because she hadn’t been married and two, because they seemed to expect her to be unreliable.

Cautiously, I opened the lounge door. They were clustered on the couch watching Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? and pouring scorn on the candidates.

‘Any thick knows the answer to that,’ Helen threw at the screen.

‘What is it, then?’ Anna asked.

‘I don’t know. But I don’t HAVE to know. I’m not about to lose ninety-three thousand pounds. Oh, go on then, phone your friend, for all the good it’ll do, if he’s as thick as you –’

Why did they all have to be in? Why couldn’t it just have been, say, Anna? I could have told her, then slunk off to bed like a coward, leaving her to break the news to everyone else.

Then Mum spotted me at the door.

‘Margaret!’ she exclaimed. For years I’ve been telling her that my name is Maggie, but she’s in denial. ‘Come in. Sit down. Have a Cornetto.’ She elbowed Dad. ‘Get her a Cornetto.’

‘Chocolate? Strawberry? Or…’ Dad paused, before triumphantly delivering his pièce de résistance. ‘ Or M&M? They’re new!’

There is always a wonderful selection of confectionery available at my parents’ house. Unlike most houses, though, this isn’t in addition to the usual foodstuffs, it’s instead of. It wasn’t so much that my mother didn’t enjoy cooking meals, it was more that we didn’t enjoy eating them. Some time in the early eighties she stopped preparing meals altogether. ‘What’s the point if you ungrateful brats never eat them?’

‘I eat them,’ Dad bleated, a voice in the wilderness.

But it made no difference. Convenience foods were ushered in and it made me sad. I’d always yearned for an Italian-style family who gathered for their evening meal, passing platters and bowls of steaming homemade food along the scrubbed pine table while the roundy mama beamed from the stove.

All the same, unlimited ice-cream was not to be sniffed at. Graciously, I accepted a Cornetto (an M&M one, of course) and watched the end of the programme. I might as well, there was no way I’d get their attention until it was over. Besides, it suited me to defer the moment when I had to spill the words Garv and I have split up. I was afraid that saying it out loud would mean that it had actually happened.

And then it was time.

I sighed, swallowed away the nausea and began. Tve something to tell you all.’

‘Lovely!’ Mum rearranged her features into her I’m-going-to-be-a-granny-again expression.

‘Garv and I have split up.’

Ah, here!’ With a sharp rustle my father promptly disappeared behind his paper. Anna flung herself upon me, even Helen looked startled, but my poor mother… She looked as though she’d been hit on the head by a flying brick. Stunned and stricken and shocked beyond belief.

‘In a minute you’ll tell me you’re joking,’ she gasped.

‘In a minute I won’t,’ I said stoutly. I hated doing this to her, especially because I was the second of her daughters to have a failed marriage, but it was important not to mislead her. False hope was worse than no hope.

‘But,’ she struggled for breath, ‘but you’ve always been the good one. Say something,’ she angrily urged my father.

He appeared reluctantly from behind the newspaper shield. ‘Seven-year itch,’ he offered tentatively.

‘Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,’ Helen countered, then elbowed Anna, who thought for a moment, then said, ‘The Misfits’

‘You’re describing yourself,’ Helen replied scathingly, then curled her lip at the wall of newspaper. ‘See, Dad? We can all name Marilyn Monroe films, but how does it help?’