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his vocation. He’s a lawyer. He should be writing one of those dreadful bitchy gossip columns in a women’s magazine.
    I glance around, half waiting for someone to remonstrate. A light reprimand would have been acceptable. Just for someone to say: Oh, come on, Dominic . But nobody says anything.
    From these not very auspicious beginnings you would say the day has to improve. This is not the case. We sit around and manufacture noises of the kind we imagine a non-dysfunctional family might generate under similar circumstances. I sip tea and think longingly of a stiff brandy and a cigarette. The brandy I can manage later on, when I blessedly return home; but I haven’t smoked for years and seldom miss it, these days.
    A chocolate birthday cake is produced, iced in Kate’s habitual lopsided inexpert manner. The song is sung. Liam tries to blow out his four candles but succeeds only in showering spit over the bedaubed icing.
    Sophie, always such a good big sister, helps him with the candles and then with taking around plates of crumbly slices. I pick at mine, leaving the icing. Liam eventually plucks up enough courage to open my present and it transpires that the identical object is already in his possession.
    Well. How was I to know?
    We limp along. Bec looks patronising; Dominic loses no chance to launch his poisonous little arrows into my quivering flesh. Kate gets pink and flustered. Steve sits silently and looks as if he wishes he were a million miles away. I’m sure I don’t blame him: I do, too.
    The hapless Gavin drinks slightly too much beer (Gavin is one of those men who assumes that at these occasions men require alcohol where women are permitted only non-spirituous beverages) and becomes hearty and talkative. Not that I can remember anything he says. At one stage Sophie whispers in Liam’s ear and they leave the room together.
    When they return, Kate, who has been watching for this, says anxiously: ‘Liam has a surprise for you, Gandie. Sophie’s been coaching him. Now, Liam!’
    Liam stands foolishly in the centre of the room and regards the carpet with fascination. After some minutes of this he is persuaded to say, in a half-whisper: ‘Gandie, Gandie. Sugar, sugar.’
    I realise what it is. Sophie has taught him — well, tried to teach him — the little nonsense rhyme she and I made up, long ago, when she was around Liam’s age.
    Gandie, Gandie, sugar candy
Legs all twisted, bent and bandy
Make sure she’s all fine and dandy
Put her to bed with Andy Pandy
Tuck her in with a swig of brandy.
    We used to chortle it together with disproportionate pleasure. It was one of the lovely things about Sophie, from when she was very tiny: the huge joy she was able to derive and communicate. She adored this silly rhyme.
    Liam cannot see the point of it, and looks around in patent anguish when he has twice failed to get through the first line correctly. I try to be helpful and prompt him gently: he starts to cry again.
    When I leave, Kate says to me, worriedly: ‘I’m so sorry about Liam, Mum. He is very shy. It’s just a phase.’
    I’m tired, and my head has started to throb with that particular kind of vibration behind the eyes that so often presages a migraine. And I’m hurt by the whole thing anyway. I’m really hurt. I’m the child’s grandmother: I’m there to be loved, aren’t I?
    So I probably snap at her more than I mean to. I say something about manners, I think, and four-year-olds not being too young to acquire such things. And then I’m surprised when, for once, she snaps back at me.
    â€˜If only you showed him a little warmth, Mum. If only you gave him half the warmth you give Sophie.’
    I’m rather pleased. For once, she has the gumption to bite back. I scowl at her, just to show she hasn’t got me bluffed, and I leave. I blunder home to all the large silent confusions of my life. I’ll ring