‘Don’t make me go to Mummy and Daddy,’ she’d pleaded with me on my final visit to Arden. ‘Please don’t.’

‘I’m not going to make you do anything,’ I told her. ‘Livy – when you get out of here people aren’t going to be able to make you do things any more.’ When I told her she could come to live with us it seemed to settle her mind, and especially as it was no longer to Chantry Road, which was so near the Kemps and all the associations with childhood.

I made the promise before I told Douglas. But he was all right about it. He felt safer with me then, knowing I was going to give up work, to the regret of my colleagues, and would be constantly at home.

‘It’ll be nice for you to have some female company, won’t it?’ he said. ‘And both of you will need to rest. You should be good for each other.’ It let him off the hook for working so hard, of course – I would not be relying only on his company. And I was relieved – I would no longer have to be alone with Douglas in the loneliness of our marriage. I would have Olivia.

Before she left the hospital, I knew I had to tell her about the baby. It was becoming so obvious and she was going to have to know.

‘I’m worried for you,’ I said. ‘That it’ll be upsetting for you living with me when I’m pregnant. I would have told you about it before, only then you’d just told me about . . .’ I trailed off.

‘About my baby?’ Determinedly she said, ‘My baby. I had a baby. He was mine.’ She spoke with more energy than I had seen in her for a long time, turning to me with a kind of fierceness. ‘I can’t hold it in my head. It’s like a dream that keeps floating away. When I try and touch him, he’s gone. But I don’t think it matters about your baby. That’s different. Your baby is yours. It might make mine seem real when I see it.’

I was encouraged by this. It was her longest speech for a long time, and she hadn’t sounded like someone trying to be brave. There was sense in it and I’m sure she believed it then. That all she needed was to be able to feel properly, to remember, and to have a period of grieving for her child.

So far as I was concerned at that time, Livy’s state of health and her odd behaviour immediately before being sent to hospital were all connected with the loss of her baby. My mind carefully threaded everything into that weave, discounting things that had happened before, much earlier. Of course she’d been highly strung and moody, but nothing more. And I had a clear, substantial explanation for the state she was in now.

Douglas greeted her with surprising warmth. The sight of her in the limp new clothes Elizabeth had sent to the hospital and which did nothing to hide her emaciation was pitiful in itself. Both of us were moved in those early days, wanting to protect and indulge her. In a strange way, for a short time, Olivia helped to bring Douglas and me closer, united in our care for her.