Olive smiled and made to walk on, but Susan stepped directly into the path of the pram and then moved round to look into it. ‘Bonny, ain’t she,’ she muttered grudgingly, as though it was a personal insult for Olive to have produced a pretty baby. ‘Mind, her da’s a looker. We always used to say that Adam and Ruby looked like one of them film-star couples – him dark and tall and her blonde and beautiful.’ Hard blue eyes met Olive’s. ‘Biggest shock of me life when we heard she’d skedaddled to pastures new. How’s she doing, your Ruby?’

Avid curiosity coated every word. Olive looked at her old enemy and now she didn’t attempt to hide her dislike of the woman when she said coldly, ‘Very well.’

‘See much of her, do you, or would that be a bit . . . awkward?’

‘Not at all,’ Olive lied, her voice clipped. She wasn’t fooling Susan and she knew it. Susan was vocalizing the eagerness to know the ins and outs of what had happened that was in most people’s faces even to this day. Adam’s family and her own had closed ranks and discussed the matter with no one, but the fact that Ruby had left Sunderland on the very day she was going to marry Adam, followed by her own marriage to Ruby’s fiancé weeks later with the accompanying swelling of her stomach, had been proof enough of a scandal that would keep folk talking for years.

Susan stared at her, and the old venom was in her voice when she said, ‘What goes round, comes round, that’s what my Bill always says.’

‘Really?’ said Olive icily. ‘But then your Bill never was the brightest spark, was he,’ and with that she pushed the pram forwards, the wheels narrowly missing running over Susan’s feet.

She was shaking as she walked home, a weariness gripping her that had nothing to do with physical tiredness. She would never be free of the condemnation of what she had done and what people suspected she had done, not while she lived in these parts, she knew that, but there was no hope of ever leaving Sunderland. Adam would never countenance it for one thing, and she felt this was perhaps more because he wanted her to live under the censure of people like Susan than anything else. It was part of what he saw as her punishment. And how could she leave her mam and da anyway, or provide for herself and Alice? And part of the time, when it was just her and Alice at home and she could hide away from the rest of the world, she could cope.