‘I don’t know. She says not, but you can never rely on what Evelyn says. I’d have them both back any time, Sadie. In fact, I’m not sure how I’m, you know, going to go on without them.’

There was so much pain in her face that I could hardly look at her. I went round the end of my bench and put my arm round her shoulders.

Penny sagged and let her forehead rest against me but she stood up straight again a second later. She looked suddenly as she used to while she was working in her first job with the mocking boys: mute and stony, with the old defences in place. Penny was pulling up her own drawbridge again. ‘I will, of course. Go on, I mean. What else is there to do?’ She turned away from me and put another set of stitched Law Reports on to the pile for gluing.

‘It may still work out,’ I said, forcing conviction into my voice. ‘Evelyn loves you in her way, and Cassie adores you.’

If the future, without the little girl’s warmth and laughter in it, was a bleak prospect for me, it was a thousand times worse for Penny.

‘We’ll see,’ my friend said.

Andy and Leo came in, shuffling awkwardly, knowing that everything was wrong and afraid, as young men are, of what might be required of them if they had to help out.

Life was no more comfortable at home either.

Lola had decided that she was going on holiday again, with Sam this time, right at the end of the summer and she needed to earn the money to pay for it. She was doing full-time reception work and a part-time bar job as well, so we hardly ever saw her.

I was seeing plenty of Jack, though and he was impossible. It was as if the holiday in Grasse, and especially the glimpse of the golden eagles, had opened a window that he couldn’t bear to have closed again. He roamed sullenly around the stuffy house, kicking the doors open and shut, or staring through the windows at the heat-heavy sky. ‘London’s a shithole,’ he snapped, when I tried to talk to him. ‘It stinks. Why do we have to live here?’

The long holidays were always a problem for Jack because he didn’t have any friends. It was difficult to come up with ways to entertain a solitary child who lived in the middle of the city and whose only real interest was birdwatching.

‘Because we do. It’s where I work,’ I said as patiently as I could.

‘Well, I hate it.’

‘You’ll grow up and then you’ll be able to choose where you live.’

Everyone grows up in the end, even though at Jack’s age I had found that just as hard to believe as he did now.

And London did stink that August.