‘Here you are,’ the young man said as I opened the door. He handed Olivia over to me as if she were a bolt of cloth, and he was gone, striding back along the short path.

I closed the door and stood leaning against it long enough to let out a long, long sigh. I felt I hadn’t been able to breathe like that for months. She was here, safe, with me.

She was still standing where I had taken her in the front room, not having moved except to stand the little case beside her on the floor. I burst into tears and went and took her in my arms. ‘Livy, Livy . . .’ I could say nothing but her name, over and over, holding on to her so tightly.

She stood quite still, impassively letting me hold her and cry over her. But I did hear her whisper, very quietly, ‘Thank you.’

When Douglas had finally decided to move us out of my mother’s house, she treated the situation with indifference, whether real or not was impossible to say. What with the hospital, the church and the British Housewives League she was scarcely in anyway. Douglas seemed to think it would be the answer to everything. He was still pursuing some abstract ideal of ‘family life’ which, among other things, involved having your own home. I think he hoped he would have more control over me.

In fact this short, sweetish time was the best in our marriage. A lull, when I saw glimpses of the Douglas who had charmed me into believing I loved him.

That day Douglas had seen me with Roland we had rowed terribly. Once we’d travelled home, mute with fury, we attacked each other across our bedroom with words whose viciousness frightened both of us. I was already overwrought about Olivia, and Douglas held me guilty of wild, bizarre things, the unreasonableness of which shocked me more than the accusations themselves. He’d got it into his head that I was having an affair with the new doctor at the clinic, when I’d barely even got a grasp on the man’s name. He called me filthy things, turning on me all his icy verbal power.

‘You’re not a real woman at all are you? You can’t just stay at home where you should be. You have to be working like a man or gadding about with your friends and heaven only knows who else.’ His eyes bored into me. ‘You don’t even respond to me properly in bed. It’s like making love to a bloody corpse.’

At this I finally burst into tears, overcome by the injustice of it. ‘I can’t respond to you in bed,’ I wailed, ‘because you’re so hopeless at it. You don’t make me feel anything at all. It’s humiliating. Can’t you see that?’

The first time we’d ever broached the subject and it had to come out so harshly. Douglas was silenced. I saw the pain in his face.