It was true. I hadn’t spoken to Penny or anyone else about what was happening to me. I hardly cried for my father; it seemed that I couldn’t. It was more that a cloud of grief loomed over me, like a storm that threatened but refused to break. I felt instead an arid, almost theoretical sorrow for Ted’s absence, and my internal world was crowded with memories and dreams of him. Yet I was struggling all the time to keep him at a distance. I concentrated on the everyday, on Jack and Lola and the house, on work, on anything but my father and me. And I felt ashamed of these reactions, a complicated shame rooted in a sense of inadequacy that had stalked me almost all my life.

I said gently, ‘We’re not talking about me right now.’

Penny sighed. ‘Evelyn wants another baby.’

I thought about it. I couldn’t see that there was any problem in having a second Cassie for us all to lavish affection on. ‘Well? There are ways of doing it, aren’t there?’

Penny took a pot of pale-blue muscari off the windowsill and pressed the earth with her thumb. She filled a jug and watered the pot, leaving it on the draining board for the excess water to run off. ‘She wants it to be Jerry’s. So Cassie can have a real brother or sister.’

I had met Jerry when he called to see Cassie, although as she wasn’t his only child and there were heavy demands on his time he had never been a regular visitor. He had a high, rounded forehead, a nose that ran in a straight line from that brow to its tip, and thick black hair that he wore in a helmet of tiny braids. He was six foot four and extremely beautiful. With such parents it was no wonder that Cassie was exquisite.

‘That’s not impossible either, is it?’

Penny gave the scornful laugh again. ‘Can you see Jerry obediently doing the business and then popping round here with the result in a jam jar?’

‘No,’ I agreed, after trying to imagine this. ‘So what does she want to do?’

‘What she did to get Cassie, obviously. Start fucking Jerry again.’ Penny didn’t use words like that, or only very seldom. Her face was stiff and her body was rigid with the effort of containing her misery. ‘I can’t win, can I? If she can’t have another baby she’ll leave. If she goes back to Jerry I’ve lost her anyway.’

‘Is that what she really wants, do you think? To start sleeping with Jerry again?’

‘She says it would only be until she gets pregnant.’

‘And you don’t believe her?’