‘Mother, that’s not true. It’s just that I’ve never left him before for more than a few hours. I can’t imagine five days without him.’

But she smiled and Molly saw that her hesitation was a matter of form, a gesture to show her mother how much she would miss the baby. She was excited at the prospect of the trip, so absorbed that she had no curiosity about the visitor.

‘Rowan’s an actress,’ Alex said. ‘ She’s going to tour Much Ado in the Hebrides.’

‘Not the Hebrides, Mother. The Shetlands. You are hopeless!’

She smiled again and put the baby into a large wooden playpen.

‘I’ll have to go now,’ she said. ‘ I arranged to meet Charlie at one.’

She bent to kiss William’s forehead, hugged her mother and fled. They heard the sound of a car outside.

‘I’m sorry,’ Molly said. ‘I interrupted your goodbyes. I hadn’t realised…’

‘Don’t worry. Rowan would prefer it like that. She doesn’t like a fuss.’

Alex filled a filter machine with water and spooned coffee into the brown plastic cone. If she resented Molly’s intrusion she was too polite to show it.

‘The last time I saw Rowan she was hardly older than William,’ Molly said. ‘It was after Kathleen’s funeral.’

‘And I was just divorced with two kids under five.’

‘You must be very settled at Monk’s Wood after all these years.’

‘Yes,’ Alex said. ‘I love it here. I still can’t believe how fortunate I am to own the place.’ She was moving around the room, pouring sugar into a bowl, finding mugs, then stopped and looked directly at Molly. ‘I felt terribly guilty, you know, when I found out it was mine. It seemed wicked to keep a place like this all to myself.’

‘Is that why you had all the other people to stay?’

‘Yes,’ Alex said. ‘ It was partly guilt. And I needed the company. The divorce had made me frightened of being lonely. Besides, it was such a romantic idea to set up a commune. It was part of a philosophy we all believed in.’

‘Did it work?’ Molly was genuinely interested.

‘For a while. For a while it was really successful. It’s become trendy to mock that sort of idea now but I don’t have any regrets. It was fun.’ She laughed. ‘ We even had a colony of wigwams in the woods one summer. And I made such good friends during that time.’

‘Like Joanna Barton,’ Molly said. ‘ She lived here, didn’t she?’

‘Joanna was my friend before she came to Monk’s Wood. She’d had a bad time. Her family didn’t want her at the Cadver.’

‘I remember there were a lot of rumours,’ Molly said.

‘Oh,’ Alex said bitterly. ‘There were a lot of rumours. Most of them encouraged by the Grenvilles.’

‘Why would they do that?’