The next day we went to the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford and I touched an old black clay bottle, shaped like a little vase, that women two centuries before had sought out for good luck when they wanted to have children. Mark didn’t see me; he was looking at something else.

I thought of the man I’d been in love with once, the colleague from my first job in publishing. The affair we’d never had. Not because I hadn’t wanted to. At the time, I’d wanted him more than I’d ever wanted anything.

That man was now happily married with twins, and last time I’d seen him – in the street, by chance – I’d felt nothing for him. Next to nothing. A flicker. It had been the twins that caught my eye, side by side in the double buggy.

And then I thought of that little girl – my little girl – with such longing that it seemed impossible my wish wouldn’t be granted.

Nine

Ellie

Mum never took us on holiday. She said that if all she could afford was a weekend in a soggy tent, what was the point? Might as well stay at home where at least it was dry. And so we were forever stuck in Kingston, which wasn’t even proper London, just a suburban town with a shopping centre and too much traffic.

One time I’d started talking about how Bella Montie was going to Spain with her family and it wasn’t fair that we never went anywhere, and Ava had given me such a look I’d shut up straight away. Later that night, in our room, she’d taken me to task: ‘Don’t you realise if Mum stops working she doesn’t get paid? If she takes us somewhere to keep you happy, she’d spend the whole time worrying about how she couldn’t really afford it. Is that what you want?’ I had never mentioned the subject again.

Back in the days before Mum met Mark, she had been fond of telling us that she had champagne tastes and beer money. ‘Your grandma used to say that,’ she’d remind us. ‘That line is your inheritance. And the way things are going, that’ll probably be all you inherit.’ Then Ava would give her that sly look that meant, it doesn’t matter because I’m going to make my fortune anyway.

But since she’d started seeing Mark Mum’s life was full of fancy things, and she didn’t talk about champagne tastes and beer money any more. Luckily, I had a much better way of remembering Grandma than a few jokey words. Sometimes – and it was always a comfort – I could feel her.

Grandma had lived long enough to hold Ava but not long enough to see me. Still, I could pick up a strong but hazy sense of who she was. She lived on as a kind of golden glow, like the sun on a misty morning: heartening, but uncomfortable and possibly even dangerous to look at too directly.