Still. Perhaps she should see Doctor Franklin. She envisaged sitting in his surgery and shuddered at the thought. How could she explain to the man she had known since childhood that she suspected she was pregnant? The same man who had seen her with pigtails, had told her she had chickenpox, had pronounced she would grow out of eczema. It was he who had diagnosed her mother. He knew everything about their family.

Walking faster, almost running, she reached the end of Harrington Gardens and turned onto Streatham High Road. People strolled on the common. It was a bright morning, the sky a canvas of blue and white strokes. Johnny had painted sunrises and sunsets, copying the postcards they had bought at the National Gallery. Connie imagined him using words such as textured and intense and she saw herself listening and yet not listening, captivated by his eyes and the way his face fell into a frown. He rarely smiled. But when he did. When he did. Well, that was why she had got into this position in the first place.

Grimacing, she hurried along past the common before turning off and waiting on the kerb as a bus and a few cars rattled past. Further along, a milk float whirred to the depot. She crossed, dodging the boy on his bike heading for the grocer’s where he worked, a few doors down from the bookshop. Harry – seventeen, skinny as a post, wearing drainpipes and a shirt, with a bowler hat perched on his head. Grinning, he lifted both hands from the handlebars and said, ‘Connie. You’re killing me.’

He said it every time he saw her and she laughed because she liked him and because he had been kind to her mother, Sarah, especially in those last few weeks, when she had insisted on shopping alone. Harry had carried her bags and accompanied her home. Connie had waited and watched them from the window of their flat, her heart filling as her mother’s diminished frame rounded the corner, with Harry walking beside her.

The cancer had been quick. Her mother had lain beneath the covers with her long hair spread across the pillow while Connie and her father had kept vigil beside her. Forty years old. Too young – everyone said. She’d died in the middle of the night. Only when the doctor had come and the body been taken, had Connie slipped out of the house and onto the common, where she’d stood beneath the cold moon and the indifferent stars and allowed herself to weep.

A year ago. Connie could hardly believe she’d been alone – motherless – for so long.

Crossing another road, she stifled her sadness and focused on Johnny. She remembered his cool hands on her body, and afterwards, the spark of his frustration each time he talked about his painting and what he wanted to achieve.