After the thaw came her tears slowed, then stopped. She began to talk. I realize now just how little she really talked about. She had schooled into herself an inability to confide about her home life and her parents. She talked instead, on and on, about her lost baby.

We ventured out at last, walking slowly round the sodden ground of the parks. I revelled in the sensation of the cold air on my face, of using my limbs, feeling I was convalescing after a winter illness. As the days passed, bulbs pushed up through the ground, bursting colour into our grey, sad world. It felt a long time that I had been confined with Olivia. My feelings had been so exhaustingly twisted up with hers. And because of the weather I had seen scarcely anyone else, neither my mother nor Lisa. I longed suddenly to see Lisa, or someone like Brenda Forbes, someone with whom I could have a good, careless laugh. I reflected that the months of my pregnancy had been sad ones, and hoped my child would not be downcast as a result.

One day we were standing by the pond in the middle of Highbury Park, the water flooding over the lip of its normal bed after the thaw. A woman walked past us with three children, two of whom ran boisterously on ahead. The last and youngest, a little girl with straight, brown hair, sidled past us slowly, her eyes never leaving our faces until her mother called her, a sharp note of impatience in her voice.

Watching her, Olivia said, ‘You know, by now he must be running around like her – talking – everything. He would be calling me Mummy, wouldn’t he?’

I nodded, helplessly. Olivia turned and stared at the ducks, skirmishing on the unusually wide expanse of water. The collar of her black fur coat covered the lower part of her face. I wondered how this wound would ever heal. She had talked endlessly of his birth, every detail of what she remembered of her first and only night with him.

Standing now on the mush of leaves by the bright water, she said, ‘I wonder what they’ve called him?’

‘What was your name for him?’

‘James. James Robert.’

‘Good names,’ I said. ‘You know Angus’s second name was James?’

For a second a smile touched her lips as she stared ahead. ‘I remember.’

Those early months of 1947 come to my memory so poignantly. As the spring came, my body blossomed with the season. Douglas was admiring and careful. He understood it was his role to make fewer demands on me in bed and this was a relief.

Olivia’s mood shifted gradually. After her time of intense preoccupation with the baby she stopped talking about him. I tried to encourage her to discuss other things: her family, the Wrens, but she was reticent about both. She grew quieter again, calmer, I thought. She did like to talk about our childhood. My mother allowed us to have the piano from her house and Olivia began to work on her music again. Her hair and skin began to show signs of life. She even encouraged Douglas and me to go out together.