I remember the last time. It was winter, so different to now. The river was frozen solid and the two alder trees were stripped bare. I was fourteen years old and seven months pregnant with the baby Ben and I had conceived in this very spot the night of the party. At first I’d refused to acknowledge it, hidden my growing bump with baggy clothing, but by seven months it was getting too big to hide and I had to tell my parents. My mother reacted in her usual way: silence. For days, after I’d told her, she walked around the house like a ghost, refusing to speak to me. Dad, as always, tried to be helpful and pragmatic, talked about ‘doing the right thing’. Mum found her voice when she heard that. ‘Do the right thing? It’s far too late for that. She’ll have to go through with it and look at her, she’s only a kid herself.’ Ben had returned to Oxford a few days after the party and I’d found out from my mother via Barbara that he was now in a relationship with Zosha, the young woman from the party. ‘She’s a very bright girl,’ Barbara had said. ‘Her father’s in the Cabinet, you know. Very high up. And they have the most amazing house in Holland Park.’ At that point my mother had no idea what had gone on with Ben and she told me all this as a piece of gossip. I remember sitting there listening, my heart breaking silently. I hadn’t wanted to tell Ben but my mother was so angry she marched round to Ketton House and confronted him. He denied all knowledge, saying that I’d been obsessed with him; that he’d politely turned me down and I was telling lies in order to get revenge on him. Barbara had backed him up. She called me a little slut who had tried to destroy her son’s life. He has a beautiful girlfriend, she’d yelled. Why on earth would he be interested in Margaret?

Bit by bit, everyone I loved, everyone I had trusted, pulled away from me. Ben, my mother. Even my dad. I overheard him talking to Mum one evening when they thought I was in bed. ‘What a mess,’ he said. ‘What a bloody mess. This will ruin her life, you know. It will ruin all our lives. I mean, what prospects will she have, a teenage mother? God help her, Marion, God help her.’

And in that moment I knew there was only one way to go.