‘It’s appalling,’ Douglas exploded at me soon after her arrival. ‘What the hell have they done to her? When I think how she used to look! Those places must be a law unto themselves.’

I hadn’t told him about Alec Kemp, though. I didn’t want to do it to Olivia, nor even to Elizabeth Kemp. Alec had been worried enough about his public image – and presumably about Olivia – to keep his side of the bargain. That was all that mattered. They could go to hell apart from that.

The silence that had come over Olivia in Arden was still wrapped around her in her waking hours. It was a silence, though, that held no calm. Her mouth was full of ulcers which made it difficult for her to speak or to eat. She was slow in her movements, as if she found it hard to do anything voluntarily, was unused to making choices for herself. She ate very little, wincing at the pain in her mouth. Mostly she sat still and barely spoke.

In the beginning, she slept for hours of each day. I had prepared a room for her with a comfortable chair close to the bed. It was not a very bright room, but she could sit looking out at the garden and the changing light on the poplars. She sat swathed in blankets and extra layers of clothing, often seeming to want to be alone up there. Everything was in shortage that winter. There was barely any fuel to be had and I couldn’t light a fire in her room. Often I came in to find her sleeping in the grey daylight, her head propped on a pillow tucked against the arm of the old maroon chair. Sometimes one of her almost weightless hands might be outside the blankets, and I’d cover her again, watching her face, the translucent blue like bruising under her eyes, her hair lying against her cheek.

Her dreams came to her at night. Often I heard her before she had woken herself with her screaming and sobbing. At first came the tiny mewling sounds: small signals of a distress beyond words. I came to recognize it and left my bed to be beside her when it all broke over her, the terrible cries, her eyes opening finally, bulging in her head. Every part of her would shake with extraordinary force.

I held her, night after night, saying, ‘Livy, my Livy. It’s all right, my love. It’s all right now, Katie’s here,’ over and over until she could hear me. I felt so full of tenderness towards her in those days that it was like a physical ache in me. I devoted myself to this feeling.

When the snow came that winter, falling for days and lying thick, permanent-looking, we stayed in almost all the time, the muffling whiteness like a seal around the house. The city was silenced by it. Factories were being laid off for lack of fuel. I felt my energy concentrate in that house, for my friend and my child.