At least there had been a perfume, which there hadn’t been for Faye or for me. And had my poor mother spotted her rival, spying on us from the opposite side of Dorset Avenue? I left my chair and stooped down in front of Audrey so that our eyes were level. I tried to take her hands in mine and after a moment she let me. ‘What did you do?’

‘I told him I’d found him out. He begged me to forgive him, told me he couldn’t bear to be without me. He could be very eloquent, you know. Very hard to resist, Ted was.’ As if I didn’t know. ‘He thought we’d go on in the same way, once I’d got used to the idea. But I wasn’t having that. Anyway, I didn’t feel the same way about him.’

‘And so?’

‘I shut him out. Changed the locks, all of that. There was a big to-do, of course, but I stuck to my guns. What else could I do? I wasn’t going to go to the police, was I?’

‘You might have done.’

Audrey glared at me. A lesser woman might have done, I understood her to mean.

‘Then, about ten months after, your mother died.’

The wording on her death certificate might read brain haemorrhage, but I was sure that Faye had simply given up. She had faded out of her own life, and Ted’s, and mine. I looked straight into Audrey’s eyes. ‘Then, if my father loved you …?’

‘Oh, he came back to get me, we tried it out. We even went away together, a week or something, down to Devon. It was no good for me and we both knew it. I loved him but I couldn’t have lived as his wife if he was the last man in the universe. I would have felt contaminated.’ Audrey withdrew her hands from mine and folded them inside her sleeves.

That was the worst time for me, too. When Ted came back home at last he had been dejected for reasons that were way beyond my childish understanding. He relit the pilot light in the cold house and we ate fish and chips.

‘There was a problem we couldn’t get round. You.’

‘But …’

Audrey interrupted. ‘You were always there, getting between us. He had you and I didn’t have the baby we should have had together. I used to think you were like a splinter under his skin. He couldn’t charm you, could he? You were the only one it didn’t work on. Sometimes he didn’t want you because you got in his way, but he loved you all right because you held out on him.’