‘What are you asking her that for?’ Katie interrupted.

‘It’s OK,’ Candice said, with a slow wave of her hand.

‘No, it’s not. She’s trying to upset you. What else have you said?’

‘Nothing. It was just a question.’

‘Well, don’t ask her any more questions. You don’t want to think about that tonight, do you, babe?’

‘She’s always asking questions,’ Candice said. Her eyes seemed suddenly to close on me, like the fingers of a palsied hand coming together in a grip. ‘She’s clever.’

‘Not that clever,’ Katie said, ‘if she’s asking you something like that.’ She took hold of Candice by the wrist and led her away.

When I returned home the following morning, after barely sleeping in the plush hotel, I drew my half-finished dress from the wardrobe drawer where I kept it, wrapped tight in a Debenhams carrier bag, and held it up to the clear summer light. The hem around the bottom rippled. There were tiny puckers in the seams, nothing to which you could point close up, but which gave a slightly lopsided air to the dress’s proportions. I immediately tore out all the stitches I had done by hand. There was no way around it: I would have to use my mother’s machine.

The machine was a Singer from the 1970s, and it lived in its carrying-case in the cupboard under the stairs. My mother still used it fairly regularly, to make baby clothes for anyone she knew was having a baby, and for occasional repairs, but in years gone by she had made all kinds of things with it, things I still shuddered to imagine myself wearing, but which had at the time seemed like miracles to me: cord dungarees, a little cotton skirt with elastic in the waist. As a child, I had watched in impatient fascination as she heaved the machine on to the kitchen table and proceeded to fiddle with the many knobs and dials that encrusted its beige plastic casing, to open the secret hatch that caught the pins, and to wind and unwind the bobbin at top speed with the treadle. This preparatory stage always took more time than the sewing itself, provided the material didn’t bunch up as she passed it beneath the needle, or where the needle was supposed to be, since it moved up and down so fast that it seemed to vanish.