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‘Is it? No, I didn't.’ I passed a rattled hand through my hair. ‘I've lost track of time. We've been to see that pony. Anna wanted to— Oh, darling.’ She'd materialized beside us. Beside her parents, talking rather too anxiously on the steps of her house.

‘Look, Daddy's taking Granny the Z-bed. We're going there for lunch!’ I said, as if we were off to Disneyland Paris, trying to protect her with my forced jollity, but also Ant, from knowing that she too had thought the same. But he'd seen her worried little face, and suddenly, from being the happiest family this side of the Banbury Road, we were crumbling. Ant and I rallied simultaneously.

‘Right, well, we may as well use your car, now you're here,’ he said. ‘Bigger boot.’

‘Good idea. And, Anna, you run up and change. Chop chop, Granny will wonder where we are, have lunch on the table!’

Highly unlikely, I thought, as I too raced inside to change my shoes and grab a jacket. When had my mother ever managed to get a meal together on time? So my stab at normality, normal in any other family, earned me an odd look from Anna.

I hurried back to the car, deliberately racing my daughter, to slide in beside my husband, who'd assumed the wheel.

‘We must talk, Ant,’ I gasped. ‘This is horrible.’

‘I agree,’ he said quickly. ‘Not fair on Anna.’

‘No.’

‘We must keep the peace at all costs.’

‘Yes.’

But as she rejoined us and we set off, Ant and I making forced, over-bright conversation, me regaling him with the horse-trading saga, Anna, gradually becoming convinced things were OK and joining in from the back, enthusing about her new pet – ‘She's s-oo sweet, Daddy, you'll love her’ – I couldn't help wondering what the costs would be; what I must agree to, to keep the peace. To keep this little family on track.

Felicity was already at Mum's place when we arrived. The pair of them were standing outside the little blue house, their backs to us, looking back at the front door, which badly needed painting. I wondered if that's what they were discussing. We came up the cobbled path behind them, through a riot of cottage garden flowers.

‘It's just a bit misleading,’ Felicity was saying anxiously, turning as she heard us. ‘I think you should wait.’

‘Wait for what?’ I asked.

‘Your mother wants to put up a brass sign, about being a reiki practitioner,’ she explained nervously.

I boggled at the little brass plaque Mum had in her hands: ‘Barbara Milligan, Reiki Therapist.’

‘Of course she should wait! Christ, she's not even qualified yet!’

‘I'm more than halfway through,’ Mum said defiantly, clutching her plaque to her breast. ‘So I'm a practitioner in progress. And one woman in my class is already seeing students. At half-price, of course.’

‘Well then, she's stupid,’ I snapped, all the pent-up emotion of the last few days being taken out on my mother, who, if not stupid, was certainly foolish.

Three years ago it had been homeopathy, until she'd realized the course took four years and a great deal of hard work and application. Then she'd switched to aromatherapy, and now this. I found her inability to focus on anything for more than ten minutes – and, if I'm honest, the objects of her attention span – intensely irritating, perhaps because I recognized elements of myself in her and dreaded ending up like that: inventing a spurious direction for my life, alone, as her mother had been, and my great-grandmother before that. All women who'd been left by their husbands. And even though my mother had done the walking, I couldn't help feeling this lonely, aimless life was only a mis-step away if I wasn't careful; hereditary. As a result, I was much tougher on her than I should have been, regretting it later. Who was it said we start off loving our parents, after a while we judge them, and rarely do we forgive them? Today I was more unforgiving than usual.

‘It's just ridiculous, Mum,’ I stormed. ‘You'll be had up by the General Medical Council or something. You can't go