But if Mirabel had thought that the presence of Rosamund would provide her with an entrée to the house she was mistaken. Mrs Crowley, with a sorrowful expression, brought back the message that Aunt Julie could see no one. She had one of her gastric attacks, she was feeling very unwell, and she never accepted presents when she had nothing to give in return. Mirabel read a great deal, perhaps more than had been intended, into this valedictory shot.

‘She means she’ll never have anything to give me,’ she said, sitting on James’s bed. ‘She means she’s made up her mind not to leave me anything.’

It was a bit – James sought for the word and found it – a bit degrading to keep hanging on like this for the sake of money you hadn’t earned and had no real right to. But he knew better than to say something so unkind and moralistic. He suggested tentatively that Mirabel might feel happier if she went back to her designing of textiles and forgot about Aunt Julie and her will. She turned on him in anger.

‘What do you know about it? You’re only a child. You don’t know what I’ve suffered with that selfish brute of a man. I was left all alone to have my baby, I might have been literally destitute for all he cared, left to bring Oliver up on my own and without a roof over my head. How can I work? What am I supposed to do with Oliver? Oh, it’s so unfair. Why shouldn’t I get her money? It’s not as if I was depriving anyone else, it’s not as if she’d left it to someone and I was trying to get her to change anything. If I don’t get it, it’ll just go to the government.’

Mirabel was actually crying by now. She wiped her eyes and sniffed. ‘I’m sorry, James, I shouldn’t take it out on you. I think I’m just getting to the end of my tether.’

James’s father had used those very words earlier in the day. He was getting to the end of his tether as far as Mirabel was concerned. Once get Christmas over and then, if James’s mother wouldn’t tell her she had outstayed her welcome, he would. Let her make things up with that chap of hers, Oliver’s father, or get rooms somewhere or move in with one of those arty London friends. She wasn’t even a relation, he didn’t even like her, and she had now been with them for nearly three months.

‘I know I can’t go on staying here,’ said Mirabel to James when hints had been dropped, ‘but where am I to go?’ She cast her eyes heavenwards or at least as far as the top shelf of the bookcase where they came to rest on the bottle of greenish-brown liquid labelled: datura stramonium.

‘What on earth’s that?’ said Mirabel. ‘What’s in that bottle? Datura whatever-it-is, I can’t pronounce it. It isn’t cough mixture, is it? It’s such a horrible colour.’