Carradine was visibly shaken. ‘Camilla, I have one more patient this afternoon. It’s just a quick look at something I did several weeks ago. Can you wait for me? We could have a drink somewhere. Or dinner if you feel like it.’

‘I’m all right. I don’t need supervision.’ She found it difficult to accept his sympathy without wanting to cry.

‘Oh, but I think you do,’ he responded, smiling slightly. ‘Both professionally and otherwise. So unless you have something pressing in your calendar, I’ll have my secretary make you a cup of tea and find you the evening paper. And then we’ll go somewhere I can keep an eye on you, for an hour or two at least.’

‘I’ve warned you about this before,’ she said, trying to recover her veneer of composure. ‘You’ll be struck off for consorting with a young female patient after hours.’

As she sat in his waiting room her thoughts turned to her mother, and the choices Marina had faced during the early years of her marriage. There was no doubt that she had displayed tenacity in holding her life together. She had been brought up to marry well and take her place in society, and she had done the best she could to protect her husband’s career. It was too late now for recriminations, and Camilla accepted that they must both move past the old hurts and live for the present.

‘He must have known what he was when he married you,’ she had said to Marina on the first evening in Burford. ‘But he chose to hide behind you so he could be respectable, keep going up the ladder in the Foreign Office. They don’t allow queers there. Not officially, anyway.’

‘Don’t, Camilla.’ Marina’s face was pinched with pain.

‘Maybe he hoped it would all work out, that he would be able to bury that part of him.’ Camilla was determined to follow through, to find a rationale, in spite of her mother’s distress. ‘But he obviously couldn’t. Or he was too selfish to make it happen that way.’

‘I was so young,’ Marina’s hands were restless, fluttering. ‘I was twenty when we first met and I loved him instantly. I’m certain he loved me too. When he asked me to marry him everything in my life seemed perfect. We were so happy. And when I knew I was pregnant—’