Sophie Witrand, the only person in the whole year who could have done with a bra, was one of the few girls who didn’t have one. She had shaved her legs just once, with a razor stolen from her father. The act itself had been executed in the airing cupboard (there was no lock on the Witrands’ bathroom door), without shaving foam or even water. Sophie’s leg hair was blonde and almost invisible, but once this soft nap had been harvested by the razor’s four-blade grille it formed a little heap the colour of silt, dry yet silky when she rubbed it between thumb and forefinger. Her mother, a keen gardener, used the bottom shelf of the airing cupboard to germinate the seeds of delicate plants. Sophie pushed a finger into the gateau-black soil of verbena bonariensis and planted her pinchful of evidence. A tray of white Italian sunflowers had just germinated, the tips of the little shoots still hooded by the old humbug-striped seed casings. For a silly second Sophie wondered what her leg hair would look like if it grew. A snatch of Edward Lear came into her head: ‘I answered him as I thought good / As many red herrings as grow in the wood.’

Her idea was to replace the razor and tell no one, but two hours later she was down in the kitchen wearing her longest nightie, tremulous yet ready to confess. Sophie was obsessively truthful. When she was younger her parents had imposed a rule to prevent her from tiring herself out by reading late into the night: book closed and lights out at 8 p.m. If Sophie exceeded this deadline by just five minutes, she would lie awake worrying until the guilt grew too great to bear, at which point she would have to get up and go downstairs to admit her transgression to her mother.

Now she sat on her mother’s lap and hid her face as she explained what she had done. Mrs Witrand rubbed her daughter’s back, alternating strokes with little pats as if she were burping a baby. She let the theft of the razor pass without comment. Then she took Sophie up to the bathroom and gave her some of her Body Shop moisturiser. She explained how shaving made the hairs grow back thicker, and how – look, see those little white flakes? – Sophie’s skin had already been ravaged by the razor. ‘If you like, I’ll take you to get them waxed, you only have to ask. But I think your legs are just fine. I’d give anything to have lovely soft hair like that again. You do know you can hardly see it, darling?’