Routine appeared where it had very probably culpably never been before. A goat’s bell was rung at mealtimes. Grace was said. Appropriate napery attended every meal. I laid the table for breakfast before I went to bed. A wedding gift of good china, navy blue vine leaves on ridged white porcelain, was the everyday service. There was other, Dutch, ancestral china for dinner parties. My stepmother’s magical needle confected dressings for every tall window and my father stencilled or carpentered witty architectural effects throughout the now, it seemed, much larger house.

In time for this largeness, the couple’s first baby was born, at home, my half-brother Nicholas Charles, named for Nikolaus Pevsner. We had become a churchgoing family, attending the highest of high churches in Edinburgh, Old St Paul’s. Some Sundays Father Chancellor, with or without his curate Father Holloway, would come for Sunday lunch. I loved Father Chancellor with his beard, big voice and golden robes. He was later said to have taken to drink. Father Holloway became Bishop of Edinburgh, then the chief Episcopalian bishop in Scotland, then lost his faith and is now a prolific writer and opinion-former. He gave the address at my father’s funeral though, quite possibly by arrangement with God, I never got to hear it, as will become clear.

The density of the frankincense, dispersed during the very long Sunday services by the swinging ball of the thurifer, was difficult for my poor stepmother during her two pregnancies and she sometimes felt faint. I developed a taste I have never lost for the ritual and intoning and chanting and bobbing and bowing of the High Church and indeed it is very confused with my faith, which is, as I write, giving me some trouble.

My first conscious taste of alcohol was after a church service. I am unconfirmed and have therefore never tasted Communion wine, and, even should I become confirmed, I shan’t taste it (confirmed alcoholics avoid the wine and take only the Host). This liquor was in an eggy Dutch drink named advocaat, to be eaten off a spoon, so guileless was the substance that was to reduce me as low as you can get this side of whoring and the grave. As many drinkers boringly say, I didn’t like the taste of the drink. I loved the Roka cheese biscuits that looked like the wattle fences on my toy farm in the blue and yellow tin that had in Dutch the slogan ‘De andere half van uw borrel’ (the other half of your cocktail).

My half-sister Anna-Sophia came next. Both my half-siblings are a charming combination of their parents and I can never believe or understand why they are so nice to me. I like them a lot and we stay in touch in the usual way; by not getting in touch. Nicholas, who has cycled across the Ukraine, made maps in Afghanistan and is on speaking terms with the North and the South Pole, is perhaps the most outstandingly silent of us though he will suddenly send a book of Tanzanian recipes or a picture postcard from Thule. Anna and I have been known to share a meal. We share the same jokes but we don’t need to talk about it. I think we loved our father from something of a similar angle.

After my father’s death, I was stopped in the street in Oxford by a handsome young man who asked me the way to somewhere. I started to describe it in the usual manner, giving helpful details but not very long on such things as north and south.

‘Do you mind my asking this,’ said the young man, ‘but are you related to the McWilliams?’

It turned out that he was the doctor who had had to break the news of my father’s sudden death at work to my stepmother. It was the precision and uselessness of my directions that gave him the instinct that told him who I was.

I often try to imagine how it must have been for my stepmother faced with me. All I wanted to do was read, and reading doesn’t shake off the fat. To her credit, she got me out on to the street. I skipped and skipped and skipped and skipped and skipped. There were plenty of rhymes that went with the skipping:

‘Edinburgh, Leith,

Portobello, Musselburgh–

AND Dalkeith.’

And:

‘Andy-Spandy

Sugardy-Candy,

French Almond Rock

Bread and butter for your supper’s all your mother’s got!’

I skipped a minimum of one thousand whirls of the rope a day. My record at backward skipping was 305, and, fortunately enough, I forget the record for forward skipping. People did play more in the streets in those days, it’s true, and not just something said to make today’s young feel bad. We played hopscotch, we stilt-walked, and my stepmother even taught me to ride a bicycle. It is unimaginable to a person of Dutch extraction that any human being cannot ride a bicycle.

Dreadfully, because I felt and expressed no gratitude, only fear, I became the owner of an expensive new bicycle and soon I was cycling to school and guiltily getting off and pushing the bicycle and walking whenever I could. This bicycle, a generous gift from my stepmother, remained in my life all through Cambridge, when I used it once, and right up till the time when I worked at Vogue. Its last ever ride was between Warwick Avenue and Vogue House. Even in the nineteen-seventies, Hyde Park Corner was challenging to a wholly uncoordinated cyclist, attired as a matter of course as a flower fairy in buttoned boots and skeletal on a diet of vanity and fear.

I started to dread going home after school because I knew that I would in my absence have fallen short. Something quite evidently needed to be done with me, aged nine, and my stepmother rose honourably to the challenge. I could not have gone on as I had under my mother’s sway, just reading and drawing and emoting and inventing worlds, completely certain of at least one person’s love, dawdling in affection’s shade.

My stepmother did a good job. I did get thinner and I am quite a good housewife, though I do not have her gift for making of any space a dustless geometric zone of purity. I am like my mother and like my daughter, a collector of clutter, but I have a nice healthy case of obsessive-compulsive disorder and replicate many of the routines that I learned at my stepmother’s hand.

The really bad thing was the lying, and that was of course, of my own invention; QED. It hurts to lie, damages the understanding of the self and bruises any love that might be about. I seldom lied to give myself importance. I’m not interested in boasting. I’m afraid I lied in order to find some peace, which of course I did not, and in order to find love, which I then found on terms that were not healthy, or, rather, it was not love that I found, whenever I thought I had.

I just wanted to be left alone to read. I did not seem to be able to become the kind of child that was familiar to Christine, that she and her siblings had been, that Nicola, so close to me in age, evidently was.

My father and his new family were relieved of me during the holidays by the inspired intervention of my step-grandmother Mama, who would have me to stay either in Herefordshire or, in the summer months, at the progress of Jannink family houses across Holland.

It is said that Scottish writing cannot be separated from the idea of doubleness, and I feel it to be so as I speak private things aloud to Liv. I hear the echoes as I confess in my unbelonging-anywhere voice in this tall cold English room.

The first time I tasted milk fresh from the cow was at Christine’s parents’ farm. They had Jersey cows. Mama brought me a mug of milk in bed. She took it for granted that she would listen to my prayers. No one had asked this of me, or given this chance to me, before. I was enchanted. When she told me off I could at once see her point of view. It must have been upsetting for her to see her own daughter struggling with the ugly child whom she herself could handle with ease.

I took a sip of the milk after I’d said my prayers to Mama. It was absolutely disgusting, so rich, so sappy. Like little Gillian at my unsuccessful birthday tea, hating the real cream, I longed for town milk, milk, at any rate, that did not proclaim so gutsily its proven ance from a cow.