“Let’s go and put Jemimah down and then you can tell me why you’ve run away,” Jean suggested, wondering what Margaret would have done if she had not been at home, as was very nearly the case. The thought made her feel quite dizzy.

In the kitchen, while Jemimah hopped around the linoleum, exploring her new domain and shunning the wizened carrot supplied by Jean from her depleted pantry, Margaret took off her wet coat and rotated her aching arms with relief. She had also been carrying a shoulder bag, which she now unpacked onto the table to reveal her beaded purse, toothbrush, notebook and a sack of dried rabbit food. As a running-away kit, it struck Jean as touchingly inadequate.

Jean made her a glass of hot milk, cut a slice of cake and then fetched the least threadbare of their towels to put around her shoulders.

“Now, what’s all this about running away?” she said at last as she patted dry Margaret’s hair.

“I hate Martha,” said Margaret, her pretty face crumpling into a frown.

“Hate’s a strong word,” said Jean, silently rejoicing.

“Well, she hates me, too.”

“I’m sure she doesn’t. Who could possibly hate you?”

“She won’t let me bring Jemimah in the house for even one minute because she’s allergic to fur, she says. So I have to play with her out in the backyard in the cold. And there’s not even any grass. It’s horrible.”

“Oh dear.”

“And I have to sleep on a fold-out bed in the room where Martha does all her painting and it’s really messy and smells of paint. But if I make a mess I get told off.”

“Have you told your mother how you feel?”

“She doesn’t understand. Martha’s all nice when she’s around. But if Mummy goes out she just ignores me.”

Margaret took a sip of milk and wiped her top lip on her sleeve.

“One time when we were on our own I said, ‘You don’t like me, do you?’ and she said, ‘I haven’t decided yet. I don’t dislike you.’’

Her rendering of Martha’s low, cultured voice was uncannily, almost cruelly accurate.

“Oh, Margaret, I don’t know what to say. What can I do to help you?”

The girl blinked hard to try and hold down the first hot prickling of tears.

“I wish we could just go back to the way things were,” she burst out. “With Daddy. It was better before.”

Jean put a tentative arm around her shoulders and, meeting no resistance, gathered her into a hug. She could feel the bones of her back, fragile and birdlike, beneath the wool of her cardigan as she sobbed.

“Don’t cry,” she pleaded, powerless to offer any real comfort. “Everything will be all right.”

But this was an assurance not hers to make and, as one of the chief beneficiaries of the fractured Tilbury marriage, she felt its hollowness.

At last Margaret’s tears were cried out and she consented to mop her flaming face with a cool facecloth. This outpouring of emotion and moisture had fogged the kitchen windows.