‘I know, Nanny. We all know.’

On Vivian’s dressing table, candles in Victorian silver sticks burned. There was a bowl generously proffering apples, grapes and oranges (they were all keen for her to keep trim) and a cluster of family photographs showing relatives at their most stiff and serious. Vivian glanced at the one of her grandpa and let out a secret sigh of exasperation. She hardly remembered him – he’d died when she was seven – but when Nanny was blathering on, she often turned to these photos of her relatives for amusement or escape. Grandpa was a vague mass of hazy impressions. Pipe smoke, a large girth clad in a tartan waistcoat, a tickling beard that briefly brushed her forehead when she stood in front of him to say good night. He’d left his estate more untidy than he ought to have done. Clearly he’d counted on having a few more years to sort things out. Or perhaps he hadn’t cared. He was rather a disappointing man. He’d inherited a pile and left less. Poor show. It was his fault Vivian had to make such an effort; if she’d been a little better off . . . well, it would have been easier to be noticed, to count. A decent dowry was so comforting.

‘There is no use in falling in love with the first man who fills your dance card and turns your head. None at all. What’s the rush? That’s what I say. What’s the rush? You could enjoy two or three seasons,’ declared Nanny. The Fosters couldn’t afford two or three seasons, a fact Nanny was oblivious to but Vivian had been made well aware of. ‘Marry in haste, repent at leisure. Everyone knows that’s the case.’

Nanny knew nothing, of course. Still, one felt sorry for her. Her sort were not gifted a season. There must have been dancing. Must have. Dancing happened everywhere, but most likely for her it had taken place in tea rooms with dusty floors and curling sandwiches, not ballrooms with luminous chandeliers and gilded chairs. It was a pity but not everyone could be wealthy. Could they? No, they couldn’t, it was an impossibility. Anyway, Nanny clearly hadn’t been successful; if she had been, she wouldn’t have wound up looking after someone else’s children. She might have had some of her own, which would have been nice for her but not for the Fosters, because she was a good sort after all, good at what she did. Vivian conceded that on the whole she’d been a reliable and sensible nanny, neither too sentimental nor too strict.

‘Who said that first, I wonder?’

‘Said what?’ Vivian snapped. She didn’t mean to, but when Nanny talked she became less attentive, and the woman had forced a hair clip right into Vivian’s scalp.

‘Marry in haste, repent at leisure. Shakespeare, do you think? He said almost everything, didn’t he? But then, not a man, surely. What have they to complain of? More likely something a woman would say. Lady Godiva, or Cleopatra.’