Why couldn’t he talk to her? She was his wife. All right, she was having a rough time with the baby, but for fuck’s sake! He was the one who’d made her pregnant, all her discomfort was down to him, didn’t he see that?

They had a monumental row about the kitchen gatehouse visits. It was hard on Nula, seeing Jill so pretty, so appealing. Jill’s trouble-free pregnancy was way behind her and now she had a beautiful golden-haired little girl called Belle in the crib in the nursery under the gatehouse eaves.

‘If you don’t like me going down there, doll – and it’s stupid, old girl, I’m telling you, there’s nothing in it – then I won’t do it. OK?’ he’d said.

‘OK,’ agreed Nula, but when she was being driven back to the manor later one night, much later than expected because the car had been held up in traffic, she saw Charlie through the gatehouse window, in the kitchen with Jill. And where was Terry? Oh yes. He was out in Turkey, conducting some business or other on Charlie’s behalf.

They weren’t having their ‘parties’ now, and she and Charlie weren’t having sex much any more.

He was too scared for the baby.

‘My boy’s in there,’ he kept saying, patting her bump. ‘Last thing he wants is my old man poking him.’

Charlie had always been very sexual. She was weary of that, truth be told; life with Charlie was stressful. She was always having to jump through hoops, trying to monitor his moods, and she was never sure how high those hoops would be – or if they were ringed with fire. Once, he’d encouraged her to take part in the parties – well they were orgies – but really? She knew that deep down he hadn’t actually liked the fact that she’d joined in. Nula fretted over where Charlie might be getting his jollies these days. Where was his outlet for all that now? Maybe he had a mistress, tucked away out of sight. How would she know? She fretted, right up until the moment when her waters burst, and then she had much bigger and more important things to worry about.

After the hideous pregnancy came the marathon session of the birth. She struggled and sweated and screamed for hours, and where the fuck was Charlie? Well out of the way. He had a habit of doing that whenever she needed him, sloping off and vanishing ‘on business’. The fucker.

Of course the midwife kept telling her it was all fine, baby’s heartbeat was fine, everything was just fucking dandy, so why the fuck didn’t the kid come out? Suddenly, she wanted her mum. But she’d shunned her, ignored her for so long, that she knew that wasn’t going to happen.