So when she was expecting me she chose to go to hospital. She waited for me, settled on stiff white sheets. Although I was small I wouldn’t come out. She lay on her labour bed for four days with her feet up in leather stirrups while the doctors tried to decide what to do. The pains were mild at first. Then her body pressed down tighter and tighter and she was in agony back and front but they wouldn’t let her move. She cried out, ‘My baby’s dead.’ One of the nurses slapped her and said, ‘Pull yourself together.’ They wouldn’t let her eat.

On the third day when they unstrapped her legs she tried to jump out of a window. The next day they cut me out by Caesarean section and by a miracle I was still alive. They told her one of my hands was tightly gripping the umbilical cord. They instructed her not to have ‘relations’ with Daddy for four months after. She swore never to let him touch her again. She didn’t quite manage that.

Usually she is sitting in the drawing room. She hasn’t been well these last weeks. She seems exhausted and her face is white.

‘What bad luck to be off colour while the weather’s so good,’ Daddy jokes. ‘Poor old girl. At least you’ve got Olivia home to keep you company.’

Dawson eyes her knowingly. Later I realize you can never fool Dawson.

I come skipping down Chantry Road from my piano lesson at Mrs Weiss’s cosy house, wearing my little leather sandals and a silk frock. I’ve had a lovely afternoon and I want to tell Mummy about it. I run inside, leaving Dawson to pull the door closed by its cold iron knob.

‘Mummy? Mummy?’

My feet thud up the stairs and Dawson looks up at me from the hall with her dark, handsome eyes. ‘You should leave her to sleep, Olivia,’ she calls, but there’s a smile in her voice. Along the dark corridor, shadowy after the brilliant day outside and the more so because their bedroom door is closed. My feet slip on the red carpet.

‘Mummy?’ I knock. There is silence. Softly I turn the handle and push the door open. I stand in the doorway unable to move.

The bed has turned red. Even her hair is soaked almost to the roots as she lies askew across the covers, her eyes closed. Her face is chalk white, the cheeks drawn in tight. She still has a satin slipper on one foot.

I cross the room. By her feet is the deep blue and white chamber pot, full to overflowing with blood. Next to it on the floor something long and sharp, streaked red.

I find my voice. ‘Dawson!’ I scream. ‘Dawson!’

It was only when my mother went secretly to a doctor that she realized how much an abortion would cost. She had no money – none of her own. Without asking my father for the price she could not even contemplate it. Rich as we were, her choice was as limited as so many others in her position and she resorted to the same thing: a sixpenny knitting needle.