Her eldest is recovering from scarlet fever. She doesn’t trust her husband with their second, whom he taunts and dislikes, and the youngest is still a baby. She is desperate. But there’s nothing she can do. The children are George’s property, his to do with or dispose of as he sees fit, until they reach their majority at twenty-one. He sends them to his sister in Scotland. He changes the youngest child’s name. When the middle child needs to be ‘corrected’, he is stripped naked, tied to a bedpost and whipped with a riding crop. She sees them one day in London for a few, snatched minutes. They are nervous wrecks, the middle one a perfect skeleton. They do not understand why she has abandoned them. They beg her to stay. Her heart aches with the weight of all that is impossible to explain. The following day, a message from her husband: the boys will not be seeing her again.

The years pass.

The second GP frowns and says carefully that although it is probably nothing, it is certainly something, and she’ll refer me to the Breast Clinic at Barts. She taps away at her computer. I’ll get a phone call in a few days to arrange the appointment. Out in the street, I finish the last few pages of the chapter I’m on. George writes to ‘my Carry’ that the boys are so grown-up that she would not recognise them, if she passed them in the street. He offers to send 90her portraits he’s commissioned. He says she can see them again if she comes back and submits herself to him. He forges letters from her, including one to the children saying their father wants them to die so he’ll have fewer of them to keep. He says she can have them back if she engages a female companion of his choice. When she agrees, he immediately backtracks. He tells her she can see them at Christmas. He writes that they have embarked on the steamer SS Dundee. The day after they should have arrived, he tells her they have not come after all. He says they can join her on holiday. She rents a house by the sea, lights fires, airs the rooms. Ten days after they are supposed to be there, they still have not come. George says she can see them in London instead. She abandons the house and returns to London. He says he’s changed his mind.

You have made, she writes to him, an orphanage of our lives.

I text my husband to tell him I’m on my way home. All ok, I ask, with you and the children? All fine, he texts back, Ok with you? and my fingers, fumbling, don’t know what to say.