She turned the heating off, but the puddle kept spreading. She ran upstairs to the bathroom, but there was nothing visibly wrong there either. Back downstairs she opened the cellar door and flicked the light switch. Water was dripping through the ceiling on to the washing machine. Within seconds the bulb popped, plunging her into darkness.

‘Mum,’ Kai shouted. ‘The lights have gone out!’

‘Shit,’ she muttered. ‘Shit, shit, shit.’

Back in the kitchen Anna lit candles, to Kai and Lottie’s delight. It was pretty, but she didn’t find it delightful at all. No electricity and no water. She thought about Grace Trelawney, living with Nick, cushioned by money – it was a safe bet her pipes never burst – and felt a deep, deep well of bitter loneliness. Anna had been a beautiful girl, and she was a beautiful woman. She should have had a handsome and wealthy husband. She should not have been living in a poky worker’s cottage eking out a living painting clichés on driftwood and bringing up a child on her own. Nick’s success galled her.

And Tim. She found it hard to think about him without becoming furious. She had been so young, so naive and so deeply unhappy. What kind of man takes advantage of that? Only creeps. Looking back, she can’t believe it happened. A fifteen-year-old and a forty-five-year-old man she had known since she was two. She would bet her last penny that Tim and Nick would do anything to keep that particular scandal from being made public.

‘Pick up your shoes and rucksacks and take them upstairs,’ she yelled as she whisked up her own shoes, handbag and anything else she could manage. She heard them laughing and stopped panicking for a moment to listen. Ice broken, she thought with a smile. Something good had come out of this at least.

The water had spread across half the kitchen floor and was running between the painted floorboards. If it got into the front room the carpet would be ruined. She needed to turn the water off; something she had never attempted before.

There was a torch, thank God. It was in the drawer in the dresser, where she kept odds and ends, and it worked. A miracle. She went back down to the narrow, brick-built space with the ceiling that skimmed her head and searched, not sure what she was looking for, but following pipes to their source, and finally, to the right of the washing machine in the space between it and the dusty wall, she found what she hoped was the stopcock. She felt rather proud of herself.