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.

Patrick had listened to her story carefully, and at the end he’d said, “Good for your mum, but I’m sorry you missed out on having a father.”

“You don’t miss what you don’t have,” said Ellen, which wasn’t something she really believed at all, but she certainly hadn’t spent her childhood sobbing into her pillow for “Daddy.” “Maybe it would have been different if I’d been a boy.”

“I think daughters still need their dads,” Patrick had said gravely, and his seriousness had made her fall a little bit further in love with him, and imagine him tenderly holding a baby girl (yes, all right, her own baby girl) like a man in a baby powder commercial.

And now he was saying, “And your dad wasn’t ever in the picture?” as if he hadn’t really concentrated on the story properly, as if he’d heard her story at a dinner party many years ago and couldn’t quite remember the details. It was so disappointing. Ellen felt that nauseous, anxious feeling again. What if she just wanted to be madly in love with this man? What if it was all a gigantic self-delusion? What if he was actually a superficial, selfish prat?

Would she have been better equipped to pick out the good men if she’d grown up with a father? Probably. In fact, almost definitely. After her mother had called her bluff about contacting her father, she’d researched the psychology of fatherless daughters and left photocopies around the house for her mother to find with particularly damning sections marked in yellow highlighter. “What exactly do you want me to do about this?” her mother had said. “Go back in time and never conceive you?” “Feel guilty,” Ellen had answered.

Anne had laughed. Guilt wasn’t in her emotional lexicon.

“I’m sorry,” said Patrick, as the light changed to green and the car inched farther forward. “I know your dad wasn’t in the picture. I’m just nervous. I’ve got that job interview feeling. I’m not great at job interviews, especially when I badly want the job.”

She glanced over at him and caught an expression of almost terrified vulnerability cross his face. For an instant he looked exactly like his son.

“When I’m nervous I just start coming out with all this crap that doesn’t even make sense.” He frowned as he looked in the rear-vision mirror. “Also, I’m sort of distracted because our friend is back.”

“Friend?” said Ellen.

“Our bunny-boiler friend. Behind us.”