Looking back on it all now, she felt that so far her life had been demanding but satisfactory. Women only ten years older than her, encouraged to remain adolescent until they were thirty, had failed to make the transition from the liquid world: they seemed brittle when they had what they wanted, spoiled and bitter when they didn’t. The younger ones, struggling to avoid the underclass enclaves of Eastbourne and Hastings, were simply worn down. At twenty-eight, by contrast, Marnie had charge of herself. Though money was no longer a serious career, ‘the New Economics’ – cautious, simplified and heavily shifted to the co-operative – brought her security. A single mother since her last year at uni, she found herself able to rent a small house well away from the chaotic suburbs; her employer financed childcare until Enny Mae was five, then a nice school. Marnie could afford medical insurance. She still saw Enny Mae’s father, a man called William. Once or twice a year they had a talk. They were making sure that whatever future the little girl imagined for herself, a plan was put in place for achieving it. Anna, recognising Enny Mae as competition, had never shown much interest; to avoid fractiousness and tantrums, Marnie had learned to keep them apart.

That was how things had rested until this morning.

Marnie put the phone down on Helen Alpert, stared out of the window of the Coldmorton Lane house, which she supposed was now hers, and wondered what would happen next. She had woken eager to share her test results with Anna, suddenly able to feel happy after the inexplicable anxiety-states of the night before (in which relief at being cancer-free was somehow overpowered by the dread of a completely new future – one into which the possibility of cancer had now been firmly embedded): but Anna had somehow evaded her again, deftly remaining the absent parent to the end. Marnie felt weightless. It was too early to collect Enny Mae from school; to obviate further changes in his lifestyle, James the cat had eaten hastily and hidden himself under a wardrobe. Marnie washed Anna’s supper things at the sink – there was a dishwasher but she couldn’t bring herself to run it – then wandered around the living area. Anna still owned books. In them, the self figured largely: self-help books of thirty years ago, novels about women finding themselves, a book of photographs entitled Events of the Self; even books by a man calling himself Self. She turned on the TV – found only news of the Indian reoccupation of Pakistan – turned it off again.