On Father’s Day my millionaire son walked into my freezing apartment, saw the tinned soup on the table, and asked how I was managing on the eight thousand a month his wife sends me. I told him nobody sends me anything.

And she has been standing in the middle of it on her own since 2022, with nobody to discuss it with, because the one person she could have discussed it with was the one person I had asked her not to tell.

She tried once.

In the September of 2023. She rang me on a Thursday afternoon and said, in about four sentences, that she was not comfortable with it any more and that she thought Emmett should see the flat.

And I used the sentence. The one I have been using in that family since 1998.

I said: I’d rather he didn’t worry.

She said all right.

The call lasted about four minutes. She has not raised it again since and she did not raise it on Father’s Day either, in that room, with every reason to.