‘You should go now, Daddy. I want to lie down. I need to be on my own for a while. No, don’t – I can’t talk about this any more. Not now.’

He left her reluctantly and she spent the rest of the morning in a dark place from which she felt there was no return. She was drowning in a lake of sorrow and loss, buffeted by waves of remorse. Her body was weighed down with a terrible weariness, but after an hour she dressed and tried to think of something she might do, or somewhere she might go to ease her pain. Nothing came to mind. As she was putting on her coat the telephone rang.

‘Camilla, your father just tracked me down and told me the news. What can I do?’

Edward’s voice was the only normal sound in this terrible morning and she tried to match his measured calm. But when she began to speak the words would not come, and she could only sob down the telephone. After a moment she hung up and flung herself down on her bed, holding her stomach where the pain had become a physical thing. She did not know how much time had passed when she heard the knocking. Slowly she made her way across the sitting room, wiping her hand roughly across her tear-stained, swollen face. She was not surprised to see him.

‘I’ve come to take you to Charles Street,’ he said, without preamble. ‘I’ll give you a sedative to help you through the day, and my housekeeper is there, in case you need anything. I’ll be home around six. Then we’ll talk. Or whatever you would like. But you shouldn’t be alone.’

His flat was spacious and restrained, like his consulting rooms. He installed her in the guest bedroom and handed her two tablets and a glass of water. She lay down on the bed, empty and exhausted, and he wrapped the covers around her. Within moments she was asleep. When he returned just before six she was sitting up in the drawing room, staring into some private inferno of leaping, flaring pain. He took her hands and kissed the palms gently, and she put her arms up around his neck and leaned into him, no longer able to cry or even to think.

‘There’s no one,’ she said dully. ‘No one I can love. No one who can trust me or love me or rely on me. This is what I have done to them all, and to myself.’