‘Whatever you say, Clive.’ She’d learnt in the past year to become inured to Clive’s little comments. Keep calm and carry on – the wartime phrase came back to her and it felt apt. This is what she did. This is how she would get ahead. Not by shouting louder than the men, but by staying focused, working hard and forging ahead with quiet determination. From what she knew of Warburton, she thought she would approve.

She nearly forgot to get off the tube at Kennington, so unused was she to their new home. Either it was that, or her daydreams about her new assignment were proving more than a little distracting. She walked slowly along the street to the flat, pausing once or twice to catch her breath. She’d been dogged by breathlessness in recent days. She still had occasional bouts of sickness, and last week she’d had an insatiable desire to drink milk. Her body was changing, responding to the new life inside her, insisting its presence as hard as she tried to forget.

At the house she fumbled with the keys, found the right one at the second attempt, walked along the musty corridor and opened the flat door.

‘Jim?’

‘In here!’

His words echoed in the near-empty flat. The plan was to go furniture shopping at the weekend. ‘We can choose paint for the nursery, and maybe a cot – or is it too early?’ Jim had said, while Sylvia wondered if she’d have time to nip to Selfridge’s to get that copycat Diane von Furstenberg wrap dress she’d seen in her paper’s fashion pages. Anyway, she sort of liked the flat this way for now – a blank canvas, a space to create whatever they wanted, hopefully something they both liked.

‘Guess what happened today?’ She shrugged off her coat and draped it over the back of their one chair, an old red velvet armchair Jim had picked up in a second-hand shop in Oxford eons ago. She had been initially dismayed to see the tatty old thing had joined them in their new place. But at least it was somewhere to sit.

‘You got a pay rise?’ Jim came in from the kitchen and kissed her.

‘Nope. As if.’

‘What, then?’

‘Another foreign assignment! I’m going to Denmark to interview Anne Warburton.’

‘What?’

‘Warburton, she’s Britain’s first female ambassador.’

‘I know who she is.’

‘Right, well, I put in a request to interview her and the whole features desk practically laughed in my face, said it was common knowledge she wasn’t granting interviews to anyone… and then today, they called me and said yes! You should have seen Clive’s face. Well I suppose she thinks a woman will go easy on her,’ she adopted Clive’s haughty tone and dropped her chin to mimic his fleshy face, expecting Jim to laugh, but he didn’t. ‘What? Don’t you think it’s exciting?’