You were there too, even though you weren’t meant to be. That’s what Dad always used to say to me, before the DNA tests proved that I wasn’t actually there at all.

We used to laugh about it. A shotgun wedding, the family scandal. It gives me cold shivers now, because who was there? Could it possibly, unfathomably, have been Julia?

My breath starts to come faster and I feel my pulse speed up. Sweat breaks out on the back of my neck and I’m suddenly shaking. I focus hard to control the panic. A long breath in, hold, slowly out.

When my hands stop shaking, I pick up Julia’s necklace again and inspect it, examining the tiny trails across the surface of the once-broken bead. Hardly noticeable. Particularly if you didn’t know it was ever broken. And only I know that.

JUNE 1976 London, UK

SYLVIA

Heat draped itself across her shoulders. It whispered hot breath on her neck, ran clammy fingers between her breasts, dribbled down her forehead. Strands of hair stuck to her temples and sweat trickled under her arms beneath the light cream shirt that today felt as heavy as sheepskin. It was only ten in the morning and yet they were all simmering like rabbits in stew.

‘Don’t these fans work?’ Sylvia shook a cold carton of chocolate milk she’d picked up on the way in after an unbearable tube journey. She punched in the straw and sucked down the cool sweet liquid in greedy gulps.

Max shrugged. ‘Too hot for them to work properly, according to maintenance.’

Sylvia sighed. ‘Well, I know the feeling.’

‘D’you know what?’ Max grinned. ‘Yesterday the umpires at Wimbledon were actually allowed to take their bloody jackets off.’

She laughed. ‘I know, I saw it on the news. First time ever, apparently.’ She loved Wimbledon, with its sense of history, its manicured lawns and its quirky traditions. Despite everything else that was happening – the drought, the economy in meltdown, scandals rocking the political establishment – Wimbledon would carry on, upholding Britishness for two weeks in a small pocket of SW19.

Jim always laughed at her obsession with it. ‘You pride yourself on striving to be different, and yet you’re addicted to this British institution that’s allergic to change.’

He was right, of course. It should have riled her, this fusty institution that was refusing to give women equal prize money despite a threatened boycott, but there was something about the bright white outfits, the almost-whisper of the commentator’s voice and the silence between points that calmed her. It was a hiatus from real life, a pocket of serenity in a tumultuous world.

‘They’re talking about fucking weeks of this ahead, apparently,’ Max said.

‘Surely not?’

‘We’re leading with “Hotter than Honolulu” in tonight’s edition.’

Sylvia rolled her eyes. ‘Only in Britain is the weather news.’