And what did that mean? How could she marry a man she—

No. She didn’t want to think about it. He was a good man, they made a great team. They’d shared eighteen months together and it all worked – their friends liked each other, their parents got on; he had his own career and seemed to accept (just about) her need for hers . . . It wasn’t a dynamite pairing, they weren’t the high-octane, party-loving pair she’d been with Jules – and thank God for it. Stephen was the antidote to all that. He kept her steady.

Yes, steady. Plodding. Safe. That was what she had always sought – the life she had never known as a child when strangers wandered through the house at night in their party clothes, when her father’s glassy eyes and her mother’s shrill nervous laughter were more unsettling than any scream, when Mouse would climb into her bed every night and together they would listen to the crystal smashing.

‘Pa?’

The bedroom was quiet, a window open so that she could hear the birds in the oak tree outside, even though it was cold. Freezing in fact.

‘Pa, are you here?’

She tiptoed into his sanctuary. She and Mouse weren’t allowed in there ordinarily, he needed his privacy, he said, somewhere he could escape the endless demands they all made on him.

‘Mouse is hurt, Pa, she trod on some glass . . .’

Her gaze swept around the room in dismay. Disgust. The walls, decorated with silver grey chinoiserie panels depicting exotic birds and blossom trees, were stippled with cigarette burns; a bamboo-style Chippendale chair was tipped on its back; clothes were strewn over every surface as if a gale had broken in and partied in the room. The vast bed she and Mouse had always wanted to make dens on but had never been allowed, was unmade, the sheets grubby and twisted and stained with assorted body fluids she didn’t want to think about.

Even she and Mouse kept their rooms better than this. What would Mrs B say if she saw it? But then she wasn’t allowed in here either.

‘. . . She needs stitches. We don’t know where Mama’s gone and Mrs B can’t drive . . .’

She crept through, into the dressing room, which was more of the same, if not worse: almost every item of clothing was torn off the hangers and piled on the floor in heaps, obscenities scrawled on the mirrors with lipstick and nail varnish.

‘. . . Pa? Can you help?’

She was at the bathroom door now and she stared down at the handle. But she couldn’t turn it. Her arm wouldn’t move.

Because her feet were getting wet.

Yes, there was a lot to be said for safe. Living in the glare of flashlights and headlines, she had had to burrow hard to find refuge in the shadows: she had a different name now, a respectable job and none of her clients had ever guessed just how well qualified she was to preach. She had done what her father could not and found a way to survive.