A few weeks after Daphne moved in, when you were in bed and we were sitting watching Hart to Hart on TV, she asked if I’d like to go to the pub with her one night. The most socializing I did was at the odd WI meeting with Melissa or when I helped out at the local church while you were at playschool, and even then I worried about whether it was too much, whether I was being too complacent.

‘Could Joyce and Roy babysit?’ she suggested. ‘We wouldn’t have to be back late.’

Joyce and Roy were the kind elderly couple who lived next door, a cottage similar to this but without the thatched roof. They doted on you and sometimes looked after you when I took part in the church bell-ringing twice a month. I trusted them. They weren’t gossips, didn’t ask too many questions, had one son a bit younger than me, whom they rarely saw, and no grandchildren of their own. They gave you presents at birthdays and Christmas, skipping ropes with hand-painted handles and Weeble sets, and when Joyce was in her front garden pruning her roses she always stopped to say hello, her face lighting up when she saw it was you.

I felt bad asking them to look after you just so that I could go to the pub. But Daphne looked so excited at the prospect, with her gap-toothed smile, her hair messily hanging down over her shoulders. She was the only other woman my age in the village whom I knew. What harm could it do to go out for one evening? To have a few drinks and act like normal women in our thirties, instead of two hermits?