She told me. There were two men, both married academics, and she’d had affairs with both of them around that time. I asked their specialities, and was unsurprised that one was an expert in literature. The other was a botanist. Of course the kind of genetic assumption I so quickly leapt to is faulty; the botanist would be the first to chide me that humans are not so predictably determined by their parents as are plants.

“I’m a member of the English Faculty at Cambridge. Magdalene.” I remembered handing my mother picked violets once. But I couldn’t remember which mother it had been.

“You don’t take after me, then,” she said. She snorted. I think she was laughing at me. Had she been bad at school? Had she disliked teachers?

“You must know her name,” I pressed.

“She wanted to be Linda Paul. She wanted it, so I let her have it. Fine with me.”

“Why?” I asked. “Why would anyone want to be you?”

She laughed and laughed. “Thank God. I was getting sick of you. That pleading face. So avid.”

“Why was she so eager to replace her name?” I persisted.

“Why not? So was I. Being a child is such a horrible thing: powerless, stifled. She admired what I’d been able to do with money. Travel and such. She hadn’t, she wanted to. You can’t tell someone that what they want isn’t what they think it must be. You can’t tell them; you can only let them go ahead with it. They’ll find out soon enough. She wanted the name and the baby and the money. I let her have them all. We each thought we got the better deal.”

“What did she give you?”

A satisfied sigh. “Nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing.”

Her book Half Moon contained a scene in which that word was repeated, just that way: an exultation. It was the comfort of the nothing that comes after something too loud, too close, too much. A good nothing, without a needy daughter and the uncomfortable role of socialite shaping her from the outside. She was water spilled at last out of an uncomfortable jar; that was in her book Noisy Birds. Water can’t resist its container’s shape; it’s free only if it leaves the jar entirely. She got out by inviting infill from… the nanny. “You must know her name,” I begged. “To give her the money… there must have been papers…”

“The money was in your name.” Of course it was. It was a trust. It had always been mine. “The trustee was Linda Paul. I gave her my National Insurance number. I didn’t want it. The books… I’d written them. I was done with them. I was sick of them.”

“But you became Susan-”

“We fled together, Susan Maud and I. Having the whole world to choose from, I named myself the character I’d created. I became my own, from start to finish. My own mother. My own child. I was completely my own at last.”

Is that what she’d wanted? Had that been her “pear”? Something worth sacrificing everything else for…

“You sent the photos to our house in Brighton. I have them.” She’d reused a box of her own. Someone had mailed something to her, here on Cantelupe Road, and she’d put a sticker over that address to mail the photos to me.

“That was years ago.”

She could have thrown them away. “Thank you for doing that.”

I hadn’t thought I’d thank her. I thought I’d bellow at her. I thought I’d push and cry and never forgive. But I hadn’t the energy. I was old. My mother wasn’t a girl, and neither was I. We were old and tired.

Her telephone had an old-fashioned bell, a jarring one. It shrieked four times. Then a click, a whir. “Leave a message.” Succinct.

“Hi, Susan, it’s me, Melisma. I’m… having a rather bad day, actually. A shitty day. Roger and I are done. Really done this time-he’s such a prick. I hate him. I’m sorry to be springing this on you, but, really, I need to get out of here. I’m taking all my stuff so he won’t have any reason to come by bringing me this or that, ‘Oh, Mel, you forgot your soap,’ or whatever stupid excuse he’d make. There are some things I’d like to leave but I won’t because he’ll think I want a reason to come back, which I don’t. I’ll just take everything and chuck what’s useless. Fucking men. I need to pack everything up here and then I’ll bring it over. I hope you don’t mind. ’Bye.”

“My stepdaughter,” she said heavily, before the machine had even clicked off. She got up and keys jangled. “You’ll have to leave now.”

Her stepdaughter. Another daughter. She was running to her now, to comfort her, to commiserate about her awful ex-boyfriend, to protect her, perhaps to put ice on bruises if he was a beast, and encouragement on her ego if he was merely horrid. This was a real daughter. Not one from inside her, but one for whom she’d instantly leap to action. She put her coat on. Shoes. Closet door, rustles, heel clicks, the bang of a purse hitting the wall as she bent over to… tie laces? Slip a finger between the back of her foot and tight shoe leather?

“You’ll have to go now,” she repeated. I remained in my chair. I was pinned there by the image. There must be photos of her in this room, lovingly framed. Hundreds of them, interspersed with lit candles. Scrapbooks too. Newspaper items, degree certificates. That’s what so crowded the room. That’s why there was only one seat in the lounge. It was filled with shelves and stacks and icons and altars dedicated to this one creature, this real daughter. This horribly-named creature. Melisma? Linda hadn’t named her. But she’d taken to her. I know that because of how she was running now, running to rescue her.

Together they’d carry boxes from flat to car. Clothes, books, bathroom things, kitchen things, art, photographs. Whatever had intertwined to make Melisma a couple with that rat, now uncoupled. Linda would make her tea here later, or get drunk with her, if she was that sort of mother. That sort of best-friend mother. Or perhaps she was a stern mother, a pull-yourself-together mother: Get a better job and stop throwing yourself at men who aren’t worthy of you.

I couldn’t match this with the mother I thought I’d figured out: defensive of her solitude to the point of terror. But here she was. The door was open. Melisma had phoned and everything in her jumped to attention.

Whatever this Melisma had done-been sighted, been of an independent age, been good and beautiful-she’d won. She’d swooped in and won. Now Linda was swooping to her. Rescue, rescue, with a metaphorical siren on top of her car.

I realised that I’d used Aunt Ginny’s image for Melisma in my mind. Pretty Aunt Ginny, so like Linda, but a little more forward, a little more willing to be crazy in public. I had to ask: “Did Aunt Ginny die on a boat? She”-the nanny-mother-“told me Gin died on a boat…”

“Gin married one of those Italian princes. I suppose she’s still there. In a villa.”

That’s good for Aunt Ginny. I felt such relief. Gin alive, and married. Probably skiing and sunbathing, and having affairs. She’d be old now, but still Gin. Heavy with jewellery and tight in a girdle, to lift and squeeze her body into remembered youth. I was suddenly happy, so happy. I think I was hysterical. I think I was making some noise. Linda shouted at me to be quiet and get out.

I stood in the garden. Linda got into her car. The door slammed but the engine did not immediately start. Was she waiting for me to go? I held my mobile up to my ear, to show her that things were in hand. I wouldn’t be here when she and the real daughter returned.

I kept the phone pressed to my ear for show, mouthing “Everything’s fine, everything’s fine, everything’s fine…” At last the car pulled away.

The garden seemed enormous to me, probably larger than it really was. Everything seemed stretched out, as if there were an impossible distance between me and the road. I could dial anyone, anyone in the world. Gin? Harry? God? I could dial anyone. What would I say to my first husband? What would I say to my old thesis supervisor? What would I say to Nick?