Low down inside me, I felt a sensation like tiny bubbles fizzing and popping. I took a sharp breath in. ‘I think something’s on the move; the linseeds must be working already.’

Clare lowered her crochet hook and sat forward. ‘Maybe. How far along are you?’

‘Eighteen weeks. Ooh!’

The feeling changed from a fizz to a flickering, like the rapid fluttering of a hundred butterfly wings. I’d read about this; it wasn’t wind at all … My child was moving inside me.

‘It moved. The baby moved,’ I gasped and laid a hand on my bump, laughing.

‘Hello, Mummy,’ said Clare in a high-pitched voice.

Mummy. Until now, I’d thought of myself as being pregnant, I’d focused on the nine months leading up to the birth, never really envisaging myself as a mother. A mum. I’d be a mum with a child of my own. For the first time since all this began, I imagined a baby in my arms, its soft body weighing nothing and yet, everything, peeping up at me from a blanket in the softest wool, and my heart leapt with an explosion of love for the life inside me. In that moment, that very moment, I became its mother.

‘Hello, my darling one,’ I murmured.

Clare’s eyes misted up. ‘How lovely.’

‘Yes please, Clare,’ I said, tears pricking at my eyes. ‘We’d love one of your blankets very much.’

‘This cottage is very sweet,’ said Evie later that afternoon as she poked her head into my bathroom and made appropriate ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’ noises about everything. ‘I was in too much of a flap about Dad to take it in last time I was here. You’ve been unbelievably fortunate, getting this.’

‘I have,’ I said, swallowing a sigh. ‘It’s going to take some beating when my job comes to an end in December.’

‘Would Betsy not consider keeping you on?’ She sat neatly on the sofa and kicked off her pumps. She looked so delicate and sylph-like compared to me. I was worried she’d bounce straight up in the air as soon as I plonked myself down.

‘It’s complicated,’ I said, lowering myself gingerly on to the seat beside her.

‘I’m listening,’ she said, helping herself to a banana from the huge bunch in the fruit bowl and offering one to me. ‘Where’s all your grapes? I thought you’d get loads of free grapes as a perk of the job?’

The bananas were a gift from Pippa who’d read that they were a superfood that cured everything from constipation to cramp, something else I’d begun to suffer from.

‘Our grapes aren’t ready yet. I’ll take you on a tour of the vines later and let you taste some. They aren’t anywhere near as sweet as the table grapes you buy in the shops.’