Evelyn took a long, lingering look around her little room before she left it for the last time. The flat had never been much to write home about. It was cramped, cold in the winter and stifling in the summer, with shabby fixtures and fittings and a creeping damp issue, but it had been her world for the last five years and she had loved it. For all its failings, which were many and varied, it was what it represented that was important. The flat spoke of independence, a determination to succeed; dreams, if not quite fulfilled, then at least works in progress. Evelyn had left the safety of a world she knew behind and had pushed out on her own to make her fortune in a city where the pavements sparkled in the spotlights. She hadn’t exactly made a fortune, but she had managed to support herself without ever once asking for help, and that had made her proud.

But now she was going back, back to Suffolk, to the family house, to her sister. It felt like a retrograde step, a move in the wrong direction that discredited everything she had achieved so far. And not only that, she was taking with her the scent of scandal. She was pregnant, with no sign of a wedding band on her finger or a father for her unborn child. Such a situation might have been fairly commonplace and even acceptable in London, but where she was going it would shroud her in disgrace. Tongues would wag from one end of the town to the other. Ironically, Evelyn thought, she would be the most exciting thing to happen to the place in years.

In fact, if the whole situation weren’t so overloaded with complication, Evelyn would have been quite proud of the bomb she was about to drop on her former hometown. In other circumstances, she would relish the expressions on the faces of people from her past as they saw her expanding form and realised why she was suddenly back living with Joan in their parents’ house. Evelyn would have enjoyed flaunting both her bump and her status as a singleton.

But life wasn’t as straightforward as that. She was going to have to throw herself on the mercy of her sister, and so she would need to toe the line. It was clear that Joan was keen to add a gloss of respectability to her story. In one telephone conversation, she had suggested that Evelyn come up with some lie about her ‘husband’ dying unexpectedly.

‘It would be better all round, Evelyn, if we just pretended that you were a decent woman who had fallen on hard times,’ Joan had said.