‘See?’ Lisa said. Then added, ‘That Kemp girl needs locking up. You should’ve called the police. You’ve spared that family too much.’

‘Perhaps it was partly my fault,’ I said, holding you close to me, my legs still trembling. ‘And I don’t want them on my conscience. I want them right out of my life – all of them.’

‘But she might try it with someone else’s?’

I sat down, frowning. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘Where’s she gone?’

I shrugged. ‘I’ve no idea. Away from me, that’s the main thing.’

Lisa gradually weaned me off my terror. When I could leave you with her for an hour, I knew I was overcoming it. But often during that time I would arrive at her house and dissolve into tears. And she was always welcoming, sitting me down amidst all the chaos of her life and letting me be there, whatever was going on at the time.

‘You’re so good to me,’ I told her. ‘There’s just no one else.’

‘We’re friends, aren’t we?’ was all she said.

My mother would be no good, I knew that. I was in a thoroughly distraught state, but couldn’t have admitted it to her. And anyway, other people’s nerves usually got thoroughly on hers. I knew also that she was not the person to consult about the other decision which faced me more pressingly as each day passed. If I didn’t go to London with Douglas, I knew it would be the end of my marriage.

‘What would you do?’ I asked Lisa one day.

Lisa eased Alice up over her shoulder, the child’s head resting against her cheek. Her skin looked grey and tired.

‘In your shoes?’ She frowned. ‘I dunno. I s’pose ’e is your ’usband when all’s said and done. But ’e’s making you uproot yourself . . . ’Ow d’you feel about ’im?’

After a silence broken only by small sounds from the babies, I finally admitted, ‘I can’t stand him.’

‘Well then,’ Lisa said. ‘You can earn a good wage on your own, can’t you?’

When Douglas left we moved into our small terraced house in Florence Road in which you grew up until we moved to Drayton Road when you were eleven.

I didn’t find the courage to tell him until he insisted on us beginning to pack. We were speaking so little anyway. He said, ‘You’ve betrayed me. I always knew you would.’

I sat on our bed and replied, ‘Then why marry me?’

The communication between us remained thin and stretched through those days of practicalities. I found myself looking at him in such a detached way sometimes, wondering what, in those disturbed days of the war, I had thought I felt for him and what had kept me believing it. I was weary and indifferent. You were asleep when he left and he, your father, didn’t even go to your room to look at you. We didn’t speak. I watched him walk down the road from the house with his cases and his camera round his neck and thought that I still hadn’t been to see his parents. He didn’t write. I never pursued him for money. I could, as Lisa had remarked, earn my own. Occasionally I saw signs of his career developing in newspaper bylines and felt some shame at how little I missed him.