The truth was, these holidays were never much of a treat for Jean, involving as they did unbroken exposure to her mother’s considerable needs, dislikes and eccentricities, which seemed to increase in proportion to their distance from home. However, she knew that her mother looked forward to these trips, and complaining about the weather, the food, the mattress and the journey was for her no small part of the pleasure. Jean was also aware that the process of hawking someone infirm and nervous from taxi and train and bus to hotel was getting more difficult with each passing year, and that the tradition, once allowed to lapse, might never be revived.

Finally, it was the discovery that the Tilburys themselves were going away for a short break to the Forest of Dean that persuaded Jean that she would not be missed, so she booked two rooms at the Stanmore House Hotel in Lymington. The timing was convenient: the results of the electrophoresis serum test had shown a perfect match between mother and daughter, and a skin graft had been performed from one to the other.

Dr. Lloyd-Jones’s expectation was that if Margaret was indeed the product of parthenogenesis, she would comprise no genetic material not originally from Gretchen and the graft from daughter to mother would take. If the new skin started to shed it would suggest the presence of at least one incompatible antigen, implying the existence of a father. All that remained was to wait and see whether or not the skin was rejected by its new host.

In the days before their holiday, Jean had worked long hours with obsessive focus and pace to clear her desk and produce pieces in advance for the following edition. As well as her regular pages, she compiled a recipe section to mark National Soup Week, and in a nod to falling temperatures, wrote a light-hearted column celebrating the vest. It was a while since she had found time for any serious gardening to use as the basis for her column, so she resorted to calling in at Oaklands, the garden supplies shop opposite the church, and interrogating the owner for his seasonal tips.

She left Roy Drake the telephone number of their hotel in Lymington in case of any developments in the matter of the skin grafts and he promised to pass on any news without delay. Dr. Lloyd-Jones had told her not to expect anything to happen in her absence. Mother A and Daughter were not expected to have their dressings removed until their return from the Forest of Dean. A definitive result was likely to take weeks rather than days.

All the same, it was with a sense of reluctance, quite at odds with the holiday spirit she had been trying to instill in her mother, that Jean boarded the train at Waterloo. At the first effortful tug of the engine she had sighed so gustily that her mother had glanced up in concern and asked if she felt unwell.