Jennie’s mother, Barbara, hadn’t been like that: quietly tutting and waiting in the wings for Peter and Poppy to come a cropper. Barbara, like Gran, had been discreetly helpful, taking me and Jennie to Boots and letting us fill a basket each: a bit of make-up, shampoo. ‘You’ll want some conditioner now, Poppy.’ Quietly popping in some STs – ‘For your drawer, by your bed,’ she’d explained. Things Dad really wouldn’t have a clue about.

So yes, we’d had a bit of a support network. But so subtle and considerate you’d hardly know it was there, like a cobweb. When some busybody in the village had suggested Social Services look at the state of our bathroom, which at that point not only had a whisky optic on the wall so Dad could top up his glass in the bath, but also some guppies of mine living in the tub, Barbara and Gran had pointed out, metaphorically rolling up their sleeves, that it was summer, and Peter and Poppy swam in the river every day, so what was the problem? The busybody backed off and the fish stayed a couple more weeks until Dad, half-cut, accidentally pulled the plug out. I remember being distraught and Dad couldn’t have been more sorry; but then, he was always sorry after he’d been drinking heavily. I make the distinction heavily, because Dad always drank, it was just that sometimes he drank a bit more than usual. If truth be told, he was probably always faintly sloshed after midday, but so amiable and jolly no one really minded. He never got to the abusive or slurring, embarrassing stage, because when he got too tight he simply fell asleep wherever he happened to be. He’d wake up flat on his back in the garden, or on a sofa, or beside one of his mares in a stable. Then he’d blink a bit, look faintly surprised at his surroundings and say, ‘Right. Must crack on.’

These days I doubt I’d have been allowed to stay with him, I thought, as we walked the filly back to her stable. Yet would Dad have parked me with Gran while he went cycling in Majorca? Or, OK, hunting in Ireland? No, he would not. If he went to Ireland I went too, whilst the lad down the road did the horses. The one and only time I didn’t accompany him was when someone tipped the school off that I was about to have my annual day’s holiday at the Newmarket sales. Dad, rebuked by my teacher, had sheepishly gone alone. He’d been very late picking me up. I remember waiting on the school steps, getting nervous. Then panicky. Dusk had gathered. No mobile, of course, and my mouth had lost all its moisture. I had him dead in a ditch. I started to cry, which turned into hysterics. By the time Dad arrived, I was shaking with sobs, and even though he was beside me, holding me, I couldn’t stop. Wave after wave broke over me, all to do with a terrible sense of loss. Because despite Dad being so brilliant, and despite the fantastic support of Gran and Barbara, I’d lost my mother. And I didn’t have siblings. It would be too convenient to hope I’d come out of that unscathed. I was left with an impenetrable fear of being alone.

The only time I felt like that again, that terrible rising panic, just the tip of it even, was when I put down the phone to Ben on the stairs in Clapham. When he told me he’d met someone in New York. I’d recognized the signs. Felt them bubbling within me, as, with a trembling hand, I’d put the brush back in my nail varnish. And it had scared the living daylights out of me. I’d acted fast.

Gran was long dead now, though, and the support network had dwindled with her. Now it was my father who was very much alone. Not that it bothered him. Left to his own devices he went his own sweet, shambolic way. I tried not to show my despair as we left the filly in her immaculate stable, crossed the yard and went through the peeling back door, which Dad had to shoulder-barge twice, and into the kitchen. Raddled blue lino curled on the floor, bare in patches, and the Formica surfaces – what you could see of them for empty tins, cartons of cigarettes and plastic milk bottles – were chipped and pitted. Plates on the side by the sink looked suspiciously clean but then Dad put them down to be licked by the dogs, picked them up later, and later still – I swear this is true though he pooh-poohs it – absent-mindedly put them away thinking they were clean. Even if things were washed, pans and oven trays were always black and crusty. All with what my dad – who, incidentally, barely had a day’s illness in his life – would call an acceptable level of filth.

Upstairs the place smelled of ripe bachelor; downstairs of stale smoke, dogs and saddle soap. The sitting room – I poked my nose in – was, as ever, a homage to the Racing Times and Sporting Life, pagodas of which tottered in every corner. I sighed and shut the door. It was probably no more chaotic than usual, but what had seemed normal when I was growing up looked abnormal the more time I spent away from it. I went to the loo, which I won’t tell you about, but then, to be fair, it got a lot of use. When Dad realized pulling the chain in the upstairs bathroom caused plaster to cascade into the sitting room, he’d done the only sensible thing and put it out of action. Three years ago. I came back and put the kettle on, quietly pleased I’d put my cleaning things in the back of the car. Dad reached for his whisky.

‘You look better, love,’ he remarked, eyeing me narrowly. ‘Much improved. I’m relieved.’ He moved Horse and Hound from a chair and sat down, rolling a cigarette on his knee. Mitch, his Jack Russell, jumped up on his other one, whilst Blanche the beagle scavenged under the table. Elvis crooned softly in the background.

‘I am better. Completely.’

Dad raised his eyebrows.

‘Well, no, OK,’ I conceded. ‘Maybe not. It’s not that simple, is it? I’m still a widow and I’ve still got fatherless children. But that terrible feeling of blundering around in a fog has gone.’ I sat down opposite him, still in my coat for warmth. ‘I didn’t think I’d ever see my way out of that and I panicked. Then later, I think I just gave up. Like people do in the snow eventually.’ I wrinkled my brow. ‘It’s weird, Dad, but when he died, I felt pretty abandoned, I can tell you, even though we didn’t have the happiest of marriages. Even though I didn’t really love him. I’d even got to the furious how-dare-he-leave-me stage; quite normal, according to my doctor. But when I heard about his bird’ – Dad knew all the sordid details now – ‘it was like a double whammy. Like he’d left me twice. There I was, thinking at least I was coping, plodding on, when all of a sudden I was back at the starting line again. Miles behind it, in fact.’

Dad stroked Mitch’s coat and waited. He’d always known how to listen.

‘And the odd thing was,’ I stared up at the ceiling for concentration, for clarity, ‘I somehow felt I’d let him down. That it was all my fault.’ I came back, shook my head. ‘Ridiculous, really.’

‘Guilt,’ he grunted quietly, making a long arm to the tap and adding some water to his whisky. ‘And if you felt like that with your tit of a husband, imagine how I felt that Boxing Day. When your mother was haring around trying to be all things to all people as usual.’

It was said lightly but it struck me Dad’s burden of guilt must have been tremendous. And he’d never shown it. Oh, we’d cried buckets together, great torrents of grief – Dad said he never trusted a man who didn’t cry – but he’d never saddled me with the more complicated, adult feelings of culpability. He was made of sterner stuff than me. Suddenly I felt rather ashamed of my recent little collapse in front of my own children.

‘I suppose the only good thing that’s come out of it,’ I went on, feeling my way, ‘is that recently I haven’t felt so bad about not grieving him enough initially. I sort of feel vindicated, if you know what I mean.’

‘I do,’ he said shortly.

We were silent a moment.

‘Anyway,’ I swept on, taking a great gulp of my coffee which was cold. ‘I’m not here to dwell on that. The thing is, he left me some money.’

‘Did he?’ Dad said distractedly, reaching down to take something from the beagle’s mouth. ‘Well, that’s something. What have you got, you little minx?’ This, not a reference to my financial gain, his commercial acumen being about as acute as mine, but to Blanche the beagle.

‘What has she got?’ I peered as he removed something cream and pearly.

‘My false teeth. The little tyke gets them from by my bed. Oh, it’s OK,’ he said, seeing my face, ‘they’re my spare ones.’ He got up and rinsed them under the tap.

‘Well, that’s a relief. Wouldn’t want those sported on the cocktail-party circuit, would we? That wouldn’t impress the sexy widows.’ Dad and I had an ongoing joke that one day he might meet one of those.

He snorted with derision. ‘Chance would be a fine thing.’

I watched his back at the sink. ‘D’you want to know how much?’ I asked.

‘How much what?’

‘Money.’

‘Oh, all right. Go on, then.’

I did go on, and even my father, impervious to such things, dropped his teeth in the sink. He turned.

‘Good grief.’

‘I know.’

‘That’s a lot of money, Pops.’

‘I know.’

‘What are you going to do with it?’

‘Well, give some to you, for a start.’

He stared at me. Then scoffed. ‘Bugger off. I don’t want your money.’