The ghost of my former self, indulged all this June day long, weaving on a rusty bike to and from the Sidgwick Site and the UL with a backpack of books, sitting earnestly on threadbare sagging armchairs, is lost to a sudden battery of car horns from behind and an outburst from the driver, who’s pulled up abruptly somewhere he shouldn’t. We’re here. My husband and children are waiting for me in the Botanic Garden. I pay him and sling the tote over my shoulder and go, all else forgotten.

The following day, I find a lump in my breast.

It’s not unduly concerning at first. I’m breastfeeding; it’s probably nothing; it will probably go. It doesn’t go. A week passes, then another. It is larger now, and definitely there. I google: breast lumps when to be concerned. Google suggests, as Google always does, that it could be terminal and 86it could be nothing. I phone the GP surgery, who – uncharacteristically – say they can see me tomorrow, name a time. Ok, great, I say, not sure if I feel reassured or more worried.

The next morning, dodging the breakfast scramble, I grab the untouched tote. The surgery is busy and always running late: it will be a good chunk of reading time. In the waiting room, blocking out the TV giving diabetes advice on a loop, the crying pre-schoolers at the vaccination clinic, the elderly man with a hacking cough, the mother chastising her bored fighting sons in Bengali, I take out the biography. Cut off from her children after an acrimonious split, she went about changing the law for wives and mothers.

Right, I say to the portrait on the cover, a languorous oil painting in an off-the-shoulder dress, gold-and-ruby bracelet and elaborate lacquered hair, delicately holding a quill. Here we go.

I skim through Caroline’s parents and her early years until – as she puts it – she accepts a proposal of marriage so that her life can begin.