Because my mother had retired early, for reasons she never explained to us, finding time alone with the machine was a challenge. I feigned illness and stayed in bed, abandoning the temporary contract I was under, which meant submitting to endless cups of tea and bowls of soup. The sharp words of my handler at the agency reverberated in my head: despite my education, I had proven myself to be just another one of those unreliable girls. A blackbird sang loudly and variously outside my window. And still my mother did not leave the house.

Many implausible courses of action crossed my mind. I could create some kind of decoy that would draw her away, maybe sending her out for a particular item that could only be located a long drive from home, or arranging for a friend to require her help; I could actually call Gemma (and say what?); I could try a school or college, which would surely have rooms full of such machines going unused over the summer; I could even – impossible in the few days that remained – move out of my parents’ house and dedicate a table to sewing in my new flat, or wherever I ended up … I began to feel as ill as I pretended to be. I welcomed the tea, the soup. My determination not to involve my mother in the process of making the dress, which had been a source of pride in the project’s early stages, became the strong light under which my cowardice was fully revealed. While my mother went about her ordinary business downstairs, whatever that might have been, I lay mutinous and unhappy in the chamber of my adolescence, under the same ceiling I had stared at for years, half-making plans that withered and died in the face of her habitual existence.

‘How are you feeling this morning?’ she would ask, advancing into the sickbed dusk of my room and hovering there, in a light-coloured blouse, like the moon. If I rebuffed her concern, she would turn away, with a pained look on her face, and say, very reasonably, ‘Alright, I’ll leave you to it. Just call if you need anything.’ But if I did not demonstrate quite so clearly my desire to be left alone, she would sink down on the edge of my bed, which tipped the whole mattress towards her, and update me on the wedding. The visits from Candice and Auntie Manda had stopped, now the date was imminent, but she still had plenty to say. ‘The flower shop overcharged for the bride’s bouquet, did I tell you? They thought she wanted roses, so they charged her for roses, but she didn’t, she wanted carnations. Manda says Candice lost six pounds in the last two weeks and they had to get her corset taken in again at the last minute. Uncle David cried at the rehearsal …’