It was exactly the kind of dingy Edinburgh rental accommodation that she and her mother used to inhabit when Margaret was a girl ... despite a million buckets of Flash, or the yellow squirt of Jif around yet another stained old bath, each flat still contained a thin layer of melancholy, coating everything they touched.

It had taken Margaret a long time to realize that the melancholy didn’t come with the flat. It travelled with her.... It was only when Margaret fled to London and never looked back that she discovered the melancholy didn’t belong to her either. It belonged to her mother instead.