‘I’m worried,’ she had told him then. ‘I’m afraid to tell Alex. What will he think of me?’

Then in innocence she confessed her life to the flute player, simply because he was good-humoured, and she didn’t know him, and she would probably never see him again.

‘My strategy,’ says Hughie, ‘is always to confess everything before you get into bed. And anyway, in the heel of the reel, isn’t he a Vet?’

And he winked.

That was a long time ago. But a terrible moment for Birdie, when a strange man would wink at her, on her wedding night.

‘You’ve been a good friend to me,’ says Birdie at the door of the hotel as they waited for her taxi, and Hughie shook her hand and called her Mrs Delaney. And then with a great warm smile on his long face, and his back as erect as a birch tree, he breathed her name for the first time. Birdie, he whispered. Birdie Waters. As if at last it might be acceptable to betray the Vet. Even if it was only in a whisper.

He stood in the snow a long time with his hand in the air. She watched him through the back window. He was the closest thing to Humphrey Bogart she had ever experienced. And he had a friend’s ability to forget everything except her name. She waved through the back window until he was out of sight.

So there she goes. Up the long avenue and back to her own front door. The taxi crunching through the snow.

Will she be all right on her own? the taxi man wants to know. Of course she will. She pays him and waits to see the tail lights vanish at the bottom of the avenue. Waits until the muffle of the engine has died away in the distance.

She’s alone at last.

And then she hears this noise. A flapping and a fluttering. And she goes round the side of the house and there’s a bird spinning round in the snow. Like a boat out of control. He’s trying to fly on one wing. The other limb trailing lifeless in the snow. He must have hit the window, she thinks. They’re always doing that. Especially when there’s a clear blue sky.

On closer inspection she discovers that it is her little robin. He is hardly able to see, and he doesn’t notice her hand. Her two hands. So that now she has him firmly in her palms, and she goes carefully back round to the front of the house, and in the front door.

In the kitchen she gets a tea towel and lays it over him for a few minutes. He’s trapped. Then she finds a sock in the laundry basket and cuts the top off with a scissors. It takes her a few attempts to get her hands back under the tea towel and then slip the bird into the sock. But finally she can expose him, and put him in a cardboard box by the range, with a saucer of water. The sock will hold the wing in place overnight. In the morning the bird will fly again.