It would be frivolous to die without reason, wouldn’t it? Death is better perhaps than such consuming rage or misery.

All I want, for her, is to soothe her.

I do not swallow the ‘cry for help’ theory in her case, just as I don’t swallow the idea that she had a rotten go of flu, which she did, too.

She did not want to wake up on the following day. That day was to include events that she could not countenance.

I don’t even know if suicide was legal when she did it, or where her ashes are. I think she died in October. I know that I wore school uniform to the funeral and that I was horrified by the tidy curtains as she went away through them in her coffin. My friend Janey Allison, Janey who had never joined the anti-Candy gang, who grew up to be champion downhill ski-racer of all Scotland, and who could like Paul Klee hold a line boldly, in crayon as she could in snow, Janey’s mother cried at the funeral. She was a terse Scots blonde, Mary, née Ingalls, who was given to ticking us off in Latin at table in the farm kitchen out at Turnhouse, but she showed an affection I cannot forget. Janey I never see nowadays but can, right now, in her button shoes, aged four, or in her ballet gear, with the petersham belt. Our mothers were such friends as I hope we are still.

Mummy put me to bed in her and Daddy’s bed, and she told me that she loved Daddy. I have no idea whether she got down the pills, which were transparent and turquoise, with alcohol. Their name was Oblivon.

The next day took one of two forms.

Either I was taken to the home of the Professor of the History of Art, Giles Robertson, and his wife Eleanor in Saxe-Coburg Place, or I was taken by my mother’s cleaning lady, Mrs Stewart, whom I loved and called Sooty, to her house on an estate in Pilton. I can remember moments selected from each very disparate residence. Perhaps there were two days inside that one day. Oddly, I don’t know the year, though I think it was the year after President Kennedy was shot. I know that I wrote a long encomium to the President after the assassination, and that my teacher didn’t like the way I mentioned Mrs Kennedy’s pink Chanel suit; to mention garments was not ‘suitable’, a very Edinburgh concept at the time. If she’d known he was going to be assassinated, though, maybe she would have chosen something a wee bitty more practical? (Is this an especially Edinburgh consideration? In Muriel Spark’s The Driver’s Seat, the protagonist selects a specially non-stain-resistant dress to be murdered in.) I knew that it was peculiar, even distasteful, to think like this.

I can remember when President Kennedy was shot, and not when my own mother died?

I know. But it was so.

I knew that something was wrong when I saw my mother on her tummy in my bed. I think that she had on not a nightgown but a green wool dress. She had sewn me a pink pillow with grey kittens and pussy willow branches on it to help combat my nightmares about the Cauliflowers, who came out of the walls and stole your breath. I do not recall whether her head rested on this pillow at her end. That is all I saw, except that her head was to one side. It will never cease to appal me that my children have seen me from this angle on account of drink. How can I? How could I? How did I?

There’s nothing so dreadful-tasting that, if it is your poison of choice, will not make you take it. That is what addiction is. The worse it is, the more ‘unsuitable’, the more it seems to be what is made for you, your final course of just desserts, not someone else’s cup of tea at all.

That day, whichever day it was, that Mummy died, I waited for my father. At first it seemed to be with Sooty.

When Sooty’s husband Sandy came in from the Ferranti factory, Sooty took him into their kitchenette where their son David would sometimes melt lead to make soldiers. Sandy had braces and the family had a television. Sooty called Mummy ‘Maggie’. She said to Sandy, ‘It’s very bad with Maggie. I think she’s gone.’

Sandy had a blue shirt and the lino was like coloured pebbles. In the garden was an aviary for budgies. The kitchen furniture was yellow plastic with dots and lines in black and white. I loved Sooty’s curtains. They were printed with pictures of onions and carrots and Italian things like peppers, and implements, whisks, which we called beaters then.

Sooty let me beat up some evaporated milk till it got frothy and eat it off the spoon. Did Daddy come and get me? How much worse it must have been for him, exposed to his wife’s grief and pain for good.

How terrified he must have been. What could he do but what he did?

He told me the truth in the bedroom of the two youngest Robertson boys, Charles and Robert. We played together all our childhood, the three of us. The Robertsons were Quakers. The house, home of clever articulate children and a scholarly pair of parents whom I loved, was always filled with wonderfully tempered vocative tones of ‘thee’ and ‘thou’. Their father, Giles, was a Bellini scholar. He read to us, very fast, in the drawing room, under the Venetian chandelier. He read, for example, A Flat Iron for a Farthing by Mrs Juliana Horatia Ewing. If we grew restive, we played. Our favourite game was ‘Siesta Time on Mount Olympus’. We put on our counterpanes and played at being gods and a goddess. If we grew more restive, their mother, Eleanor, or one of the older children would say, ‘Thee must not romp in the drawing room!’

Maybe a year later I was to embarrass Charles by pretending that he was my ‘boyfriend’ so as to stop being nagged about the existence of such a person by other girls at school. I said that he looked like Napoleon Solo from the Man from U.N.C.L.E. television programme and the bubblegum cards that were a modish collector’s item among schoolgirls at that time. Charles had heard of neither. The Robertson children and I were all avidly reading Pale Fire at that point. More secret languages were being learned but I had grown too drawn by the double tongue of trying to fit in. We were preoccupied by the work and pacifism of Bertrand Russell; also by his home life.

In Charles and Robert’s bedroom, my father told me nothing but the truth, upon which he never again enlarged; very likely, for him, the only way.

‘Candia’, he said. ‘You will never see your mother again.’

People ask, ‘Are you angry with your mother?’ I am angry with neither of them though I feel vivid disgust at myself still.

I went down the inside stone stairs and out into Saxe-Coburg Place, a green square; after that, I walked around the quadrilateral autumn pavement, feeling important, shut out, and singular.

I started to tell myself the story on that day whose end is my writing this down. I shall try to tell it as exactly as I can. I thought on that day, whenever it was, that this new swerve in my story made me interesting, but I see that in fact it is a story that makes us connected, not myself singular. It is the story of loss.

That exchange, of desolation for empathy, disclosed itself to me quite close upon my mother’s death, the click of a new consciousness that I would be better advised to listen than to assert when it came to suffering, that it is not a game of trumps, and that the suffering of those one loves cannot but be worse than one’s own.

My poor father read to me all night in the basement at the Robertsons’ house, The Sword in the Stone. Can you imagine his peril and his tiredness? The sheets were linen, an act of sure hospitality on the part of our hostess. Linen sheets are chaste luxury and comfort.

Later, I became a sort of succubus upon the whole Robertson family. I was to do it with other families, too.

That night I had — or so my memory, which is as reliable as my eyelids, tells me — a dream after I fell asleep in the early morning, that foretold the future. I would go away, far away.