She nodded, and in a tiny voice said, ‘Katie.’

‘Are all the nurses like her?’ I asked, inclining my head a fraction towards the woman who had planted herself over by the door.

Olivia followed my glance, fearfully. ‘She’s not a nurse,’ she whispered. ‘She’s a miner’s wife. Her husband works in the men’s side. He couldn’t get a job. They’re from Cannock.’ She added as if incidentally, ‘Everybody shouts here.’

Then the little girl voice came back. ‘I think I’ve had some sort of breakdown. That’s what Daddy says, and the doctor says so. I can’t seem to – manage any more. And they give me things. I don’t know what they give me.’

‘Give you things?’

‘Medicine. White stuff. They don’t tell you.’

‘It’s probably to help you keep calm,’ I told her.

‘My tummy hurts. I think there’s something wrong with my insides.’

‘Did you tell the doctor?’

‘He said I was imagining it.’ She began rocking the upper half of her body quickly back and forth. I saw the nurse’s eyes swivel towards her.

‘Livy,’ I whispered. ‘Try and keep still or she’ll make you go back now.’

To my shame I found myself half wishing the nurse would take her away from us, out of my sight. I felt utterly helpless. What could I say? It was impossible to talk about anything: the past, the future were meaningless here. Everything was foreshortened into these minutes, here between these walls.

‘What day is it?’ Olivia asked.

‘Sunday,’ Elizabeth told her gently. ‘It’ll always be Sunday when we come, darling.’

‘The thing is,’ she said, suddenly speaking calmly and firmly. ‘They say I’m not well.’ She directed a look of piercing malevolence at her mother. ‘Nurse Tucker says she thinks I have good reason.’

Suddenly there were tears pouring down her face again. She had a terrible grip on my hands, and appealed to me, not her mother. ‘I don’t want people to see me like this. Help me, Katie. Help me – please.’

I was filled with panic, choking with it. ‘What can I do? I don’t know what to do.’ I pulled my hands away and took her tightly in my arms as she cried, making loud, jarring sounds which reached higher into shrieks. The nurse was upon us immediately.

‘Come on, now,’ she said ‘That’s enough. You come with me.’ With rough skill she seized Olivia and pinned her arms to her sides. She was more than a match for her in size and strength.

‘I can’t go back up there!’ Livy screamed. ‘Not through all those doors. Don’t take me back!’

‘We’ll come again,’ we told her, but she wasn’t hearing us.

The last sounds I heard were her screams echoing along the dark corridor, and the sound of a large key being turned. My legs were shaking so I could barely stand.

As our taxi moved down Arden’s curving drive, taking us back to the station, I said to Elizabeth, ‘What d’you think she meant – about having good reason? What is all this about?’