She wondered what she should make. She decided on a simple bowl. She had in mind a ewer – which, later on, she might glaze and decorate. She was suddenly taken by a strange feeling of excitement.

She pressed the foot treadle to spin the wheel and used her thumbs – as she had been briefly instructed by Jocelyn Hulton – to begin to mould a hollow in the clay. She was at first surprised by how easy this seemed to be. Yet, soon, however hard she tried to make her bowl perfectly round, the thing persisted in an obstinate lean to the left. Again and again, Emmeline’s careful hands encouraged it towards the shape she wanted it to take, but each time, it refused. It not only gravitated towards its leftward lean, but began to manifest a peculiar narrowing of its neck, as though it yearned – without any instruction from the potter herself – to become a drinking vessel.

Emmeline stopped the wheel, stood back and regarded it. She wondered whether experienced potters sometimes had to contend with this kind of mutiny of their material, or whether it had come about simply because of her lack of skill. She looked up as a growl of thunder made the house appear to tremble. The deluge upon Chelsea grew fiercer. It felt to Emmeline as if the driving rain might now crack the skylight above the studio and leave all her precious paints and canvases open to the sky. And indeed, after another few minutes had passed, Emmeline saw that the water had found a tiny fissure in the glass and was now falling, drip by drip, onto the half-formed object on the pottery wheel.

As she watched this happening, her heart began to beat very fast and she snatched at her blue laudanum jar and drank thirstily. It now seemed clear to her what was occurring: Nature itself did not look kindly on the vessel she’d made. It wished for something else.

Emmeline had told the story about the pottery wheel to very few people, but one of them – whom she had come to trust with many of the secrets of her life – had been her niece, Jane. Before she had revealed how the tale ended, Emmeline had said to Jane, ‘People are disposed not to believe it. You, my dearest Jane, will trust in it, I know, because you and I do not lie to each other, but others suggest that my mind was deluded into seeing something in a state of alteration, because I was taking laudanum for my pain and my sadness. But I was not deluded. You could more truthfully say that I was witness to something phenomenal.’

‘Ah,’ Jane had replied, ‘that is my favourite kind of thing! If only there was more of the phenomenal in Bath …’

Jane had been reclining upon the couch in Aunt Emmeline’s studio, settling her skirts comfortably around her, and had felt enthralled already by what she was about to be told. The world, Jane already knew, reeked horribly of old, exhausted things. Day could follow wearisome day without a single original or exciting moment stirring her pulse. But now Aunt Emmeline – by far the most exceptional and independent person in the Adeane family – was going to reveal something new. Jane felt ready to hug her aunt before the story had even begun.