When she cried, which was often again now, John said she was unstable, and perhaps she was. “You’re hard work,” he’d tell her, and sometimes he’d seem to say it fondly, but it always made her ashamed.

Katrina tried to change herself to fit with John’s idea of how she should be. She ate very little so she could lose the baby weight as soon as possible, and tried to be bright and cheerful when he came back from Oban, or out of his study in the evenings, tried not to burst into tears when he made the mildest of criticisms. “You’re so sensitive,” he’d say. Katrina wasn’t sure where all the love and joy of their early relationship had gone, but she thought that if she’d only tried harder, paid better attention, it wouldn’t have slipped away like this without her noticing.

Despite her best efforts, they often argued now, and Katrina knew John was right when he said she was to blame. She lost her temper with him in ways she never had in her life before, and then he would stand back, watching her with that rueful half-smile on his face, as though he’d known all along she would end up shouting like this, but had still hoped to be wrong. How regularly she disappointed him. When she was angry like this, Katrina couldn’t even remember how it had happened, except that John seemed so cruel sometimes in the things he said, and the more she tried to defend herself, the worse she came to seem to herself and to him. She, who had always been so calm and self-contained as a child, discovered what it meant now to be “beside yourself”.

She couldn’t believe how she shouted at him. He never raised his voice to her.

“You’re from a broken home,” John told her. “You don’t know how to have a normal relationship. It’s not your fault really. But it’s hard for me. Your mother warped you.”

Was she warped? Katrina thought about this word, this ugly word with its too-long vowel sound, as though it too were twisted out of shape. She carried it in her head as she went about her daily tasks. Perhaps that was what caused her to make silly mistakes, burning food and shrinking John’s favourite shirt (she had not even known he had a favourite shirt until she shrank it).

“I told you not to put it in with the others,” John told her, holding it up with a frown. The sleeves were too short now and the body looked oddly slim.

“I didn’t know it was hand wash,” Katrina said. “I’m sorry. I thought it was the same as the others.” What kind of shirt was hand wash only?

He shook his head, doing that smile again. “Darling, I told you.”