Out of sight. But not quite out of mind.

The programme was illustrated with a selection of Christmas-themed drawings by the children: wobbly six-pointed stars made of two triangles drawn over each other, stick people with wings, even a more or less recognisable angel. I hadn’t asked Daisy whether any of the drawings were hers. Just like Mark, I had known at a glance that they weren’t.

Daisy showed no interest in drawing at all. Either that… or she just couldn’t do it. She did like to paint, though: she just didn’t paint anything in particular. Every now and then her artwork came home in her bookbag. Everything looked like an abstract sunset: great washes and stripes and whorls of colour blurring into each other, but nothing you could identify as anything else.

You couldn’t put abstract sunsets on a photocopied programme for a Christmas show. Shrunk down and reproduced in black and white, they’d just look like… like something that didn’t make sense. A mistake. Something with no reason to be there.

But Daisy’s birthday was in the spring and some of these kids were four already, and at that age, six months made a big difference…

Anyway, we knew her development was lagging behind, but we’d been given to understand that there was no immediate cause for concern. After all, she was developing – just not as quickly as might have been expected. I’d spoken to the health visitor about it at her two-year check; I’d chatted about it to Donna, the pre-school supervisor, after filling in all the background information forms and being struck all over again by how much she couldn’t do. They’d both said keep doing your best and wait and see. Nobody, apart from Ingrid, had insisted that there was something to worry about.

But what if there was?

The queue suddenly began to move forward. ‘Finally,’ Mark said. ‘Let’s hope this is worth the wait.’

As I made my way up the steps behind him I felt a pang of foreboding. But that was ridiculous; there was nothing ominous about this. Precisely the opposite. What could be sweeter than a Christmas show put on by little children?

It was just a weird kind of nerves, that was all… it was another of those parental firsts. The children were so little, nobody would be expecting too much of them, and Daisy wouldn’t be the only one who had never done anything in front of an audience before. This was just a bit of fun, a chance to show off to the grown-ups.

I showed our programmes to the pre-school assistant at the door – it was Amy, the plump, blonde, motherly woman who was Daisy’s key worker.

Amy beamed at me. ‘She’s done ever so well,’ she said. ‘It’s a lovely show.’

On top of the bookshelf to one side, I spotted something Amy had put there specifically for Daisy: a little pot of gluesticks. Daisy loved nothing better than to take one of them and roll them between her hands. She would do the same with almost any small object – straws or teaspoons were favourites, too.