It wasn’t going to be like that at all.

“Mum has had a few long-term relationships over the years,” she told Patrick. “But not for a while now.”

“And your dad is just … not in the picture?”

“Never anywhere near the picture,” said Ellen. She paused, aware of a slight flash of irritation. “Like I said.”

She had told him her family history a few weeks after they started dating. She had perfected the telling of the story over the years, so that it was the ideal party piece or dinner party anecdote, unusual and interesting and intimate, just the right length, with no embarrassing emotion likely to cause guests to shift uneasily in their seats.

She always started the same way. “My mother was a woman ahead of her time.” Then she would explain that early on the morning of the first of January 1971 the intensely pragmatic Doctor Anne O’Farrell made a New Year’s resolution to become a single mother. She was a successful, independent woman in her thirties and she didn’t especially want to be married, but she did (oddly) want a baby. With the help of her two closest female friends, she made a list of potential candidates to father her child, along with their positive and negative attributes: their education levels, their medical histories and their personality traits.

Anne had kept these lists and given them to Ellen when she was a teenager. Her “father” was a list of bullet points in her mother’s scrawly handwriting with the figure “85%” circled next to it. The highest score by ten percent.

Her father’s positive attributes included “postgraduate education level” (he was a surgeon; Anne had met him at the university), “good teeth,” “small ears” (her mother abhorred large, flappy ears), “excellent skin,” “no family history of heart disease, diabetes or respiratory problems” and “good social skills.”

His negative attributes were “eyesight” (glasses), “spiritual tendencies,” “mother who reads tarot cards,” “somewhat strange sense of humor” and “engaged to be married.”

Over recent years, Ellen had started leaving off the “engaged to be married” part when she told people about the list. She didn’t know if it was the whole world that was becoming more moral—a sort of increasing level of global prudishness—or if it was just her own social circle that appeared to be becoming more conservative.

Apparently her father’s engagement hadn’t been an obstacle. It had been as easy as pie to seduce him, not just once, but the optimum number of times, and on the appropriate days before and after ovulation.

“It was the seventies after all,” said her mother.

And that was that. A job well done. Her “father” got married two months later, and went off to live in the UK and never knew of Ellen’s existence.

“What if I wanted to go and find my dad?” she’d said to her mother when she was going through her extremely tame, short-lived rebellious teenager stage, and she quivered a little at the unfamiliar, almost sexual word in her mouth, “Dad.”

“I’m not stopping you.” Anne didn’t even look up from the newspaper she was reading. “It would be a very cruel, hurtful thing to do to his wife.”

And, of course, Ellen would never knowingly do anything cruel or hurtful, and besides, the thought of actually meeting this middle-aged man filled her with shyness. Her friends’ fathers were big and hairy and deep-voiced, sometimes funny but mostly boring, and somehow essentially irrelevant to real life.

Her mother’s friends Melanie and Phillipa had never had children of their own. They had been Ellen’s godmothers, and for much of Ellen’s childhood had shared a house with her mother. There had been various boyfriends who arrived to take them out on dates, who sometimes turned up at breakfast time (unshaven and croaky-voiced at the kitchen table), but mostly they were just an amusing sideshow in Ellen’s life; their mannerisms and appearances were dissected with much hilarity before they vanished. (Although Mel had finally got married in her fifties to a shy, inscrutable man who seemed to make her very happy and didn’t overly impact on her social life.)

“It was like having three mothers,” Ellen would tell people, which was true. Three successful, opinionated single women who all had an equal say in her upbringing.

“It was like growing up in a lesbian commune,” she’d continue, but she’d stopped saying that as she got older, because she’d just been trying to sound sophisticated and edgy, and maybe it was a bit disrespectful to lesbians, and she actually had no idea what it would be like to live in a lesbian commune or even if they existed.

“So my father was basically a sperm donor—he just didn’t know it.” That’s how she always finished the story, and it normally generated lots of stimulating discussion, and people would say things like, “Aha! That’s where you get your hypnotism thing from—your spiritual dad and your tarot card–reading grandma!” (as if they were the first people in the world to have thought of that), and some would applaud her mother’s actions, and others would politely, or not so politely, express their disapproval.

She didn’t mind when people disapproved. She wasn’t sure if she approved herself, but she knew her mother couldn’t care less what anyone else thought, and Ellen had told the story of her conception so many times now, she felt quite detached from it. It was like Julia’s story of how her father had kidnapped her and her brother during a bitter custody dispute between her parents and dyed their hair brown, and there had even been a thrilling police chase. Ellen knew that Julia must have once felt some sort of emotion about this memory, and probably at some subconscious level she still did, but now it was just an excellent story. A party piece.