But he didn’t. He locked his hands behind his neck and rocked his head like an autistic child. I just wanted to comfort him. He didn’t need to get so worked up. It was only me. I’m still only me. That’s what he can’t seem to get. I said, “Darling.”

He dropped his hands and I saw that his eyes were red and watery. He said, “Don’t call me that,” and he walked away, and I stayed where I was, looking at the specials pinned up on the window of the shop where we always got fish and chips on a Sunday night.

That’s the thing. I’m permanently stuck in this crazy person role now. He will always think of me as a crazy person. He used to think I was a “funny bugger” and I had “beautiful eyes” and that I was “one of the most generous people he’d ever met.” Those were all things he said to me, things he meant at the time.

But now I’m just crazy.

The only way for me to not be crazy would be to disappear from his life. Like a proper ex-girlfriend is expected to do. To discreetly vanish into the past.

And that’s what drives me … crazy.

Ellen could see Patrick’s “fight or flight” response kick in as soon as they walked across the doorway of her mother’s home.

Oh, my poor darling, she thought. She remembered the first time she’d taken Jon to meet her mother; the way he’d looked about with those lazy, hooded eyes, so certain of his own superiority. Patrick’s clear green eyes were darting about as if looking for possible escape routes, and he was clearing his throat over and over.

It mattered to him what Ellen’s mother thought. It mattered, and that meant Ellen mattered.

Poor man. It was understandable that he was nervous. Jon was an exception; most men would find this intimidating.

Three immensely elegant, immensely confident women in their sixties, all holding the delicate stems of their wineglasses with their fingertips, all bizarrely dressed almost entirely in white, to complement her mother’s all-white theme—white couches, white walls, white accessories—all swooping down from the high stools on which they’d been perched to kiss Patrick on both cheeks. And Patrick, who only expected to be kissed on one cheek and kept offering the wrong one, having to bend awkwardly at the knees so they could reach him.

“Why are you all dressed in white?” asked Ellen. “You’re blending into the furniture.”

There were peals of laughter.

“We couldn’t believe it when we saw each other!” gurgled Pip.

“We look like that Bette Midler movie. First Wives Club. Not that we’ve ever been wives.” Ellen watched her mother’s eyes rest on Patrick’s tradesman-out-on-the-town outfit of blue jeans and long-sleeved Just Jeans checked shirt rolled to the elbows. Jon wore Armani and Versace and some other Italian men’s designer label that was so very special Ellen had never heard of it.

“Ah, Anne, Mel is a wife,” pointed out Pip.

“Of course she is. I just never think of her as one. Which is a compliment, Mel.”

“I’m so flattered, Anne.”

“Who else was in that movie?” mused Pip. “Bette Midler, Goldie Hawn and somebody else. Someone I like. Do you know, Patrick?”

Patrick looked startled. “Ah, I’m not—”

“We finally worked out it was because we’d all read the same article in Vogue,” said Mel. “About flattering colors for women in their fifties. Not that we’re technically in our fifties.”

“Speak for yourself,” said Anne. Ellen’s mother found it genuinely insulting to be reminded of her actual age.

“You’re thirty-four days older than me, Anne O’Farrell.”

“Diane Keaton!” cried Pip. “That was the third wife. Thank goodness I got it. That was going to drive me crazy for the whole night.”

“Patrick, what can we get you? Beer, wine, champagne, spirits? You sound very dry.” Ellen’s mother flicked her hand at the sideboard containing a selection of drinks on ice, while keeping her violet eyes upon Patrick, like a bird on its prey.

(Anne’s eyes were her most striking feature. Her friends had wanted her to enter an Elizabeth Taylor look-alike competition when she was young, and she probably would have won if she hadn’t thought such competitions beneath her. Unfortunately, she hadn’t seen fit to pass on her beautiful eyes to Ellen. Obviously this wasn’t really her decision, except that Ellen had always suspected that if her mother did have the choice, she might have decided to keep all the glory for herself. She was very vain about her eyes.)

Patrick cleared his throat again. “A beer would be great, thanks, ah…”

“You haven’t actually introduced us properly yet, Ellen. The poor man probably thinks he’s stumbled into some sort of elderly harem.”

“You haven’t stopped talking,” said Ellen. She put her hand on Patrick’s arm. “Patrick, this is my mother, Anne.”

“Can you see the resemblance?” Anne fluttered her eyelashes up at him as she handed Patrick a glass of beer.

“I’m not … I’m not sure.” Patrick clutched his hand around his beer.

“And my godmothers, Mel and Pip,” continued Ellen, ignoring her mother. “Or are you Phillipa tonight? She switches back and forth.”

“Depending on whether I’m skinny or fat,” said Phillipa. She beamed at Patrick and waved a hand up and down her plump body. “So it’s perfectly obvious who I am right now, hey?”