Irene’s feet were swollen with heat; sweat gathered under her armpits and trickled down her forehead into her eyes. The white sun burned in through the open window. She negotiated the turnings on the seething ring road and headed for the A31, signposted to Nuits St George and Chalon. She couldn’t remember her first day at school, but she remembered jumping in puddles in its playground, splattering her bare calves and short white socks with mud, and she could remember viciously shoving a girl called Emily Low against the wall and hissing in her ear, ‘I’ve gone off you.’ She couldn’t remember the house in Sheffield where they’d lived until she was six, but she vividly recalled the tree in her friend’s garden, and how she had climbed it once, scrambling up from branch to branch, blunt shoes slipping and twigs catching in her hair, dizzy with horrified excitement, until her friend’s mother had come out of the house and screamed, in a voice high with fear, for her to come down; then Irene had lost her nerve and been unable to move.

She’d been a bookworm and a flat-chested tomboy until she was thirteen or fourteen, warding off the terrors of puberty. Not dolls but swords and cricket bats; not lipstick and jangly earrings but scabby knees and torn jeans and a passion for animals; not boys but books – any book she happened to come across, dictionaries and Shakespeare plays and bad poems, reading them over and over again, learning words by heart and reciting them to herself at night, lying on her bed in her room, full up and lethargic with words – and a love for solitary imaginary games in which she could be a cowboy, a knight on horseback, a pilgrim, a shipwrecked sailor, a warrior-hero, rescuing others and riding away again.

Even when she fell in love for the first time, aged sixteen, she wouldn’t admit it to herself, certainly not to him. Greg, that had been his name; she pulled it from the deep well of memory and smiled. Greg with floppy hair and baggy jeans. They’d been in the school play together and she’d lost her appetite and sleep over his bland, smiling face, but held the feeling close and secret, even encouraging her friend Carly Jones to go out with him. She didn’t want to enter that confusing world where boundaries between the self and the world dissolved. She hadn’t had her first real boyfriend until she was seventeen going on eighteen, and even then was wary and suspicious of desire. She didn’t want to lose her angular, stubborn, mutinous self. She didn’t want to become her soft-hearted, lonely, abandoned mother, sobbing in her bed at night when she thought Irene couldn’t hear her.