Still half-asleep, reclining in the safety of my illness, I let the talk wash over me, and found it mattered less, bothered me less, than it had before, when I had been so determined to counteract it by bringing to the wedding something of which my mother would not know in advance. The headache I had invented grew stronger. With only a couple of days to go, I found myself in tears: she was looking after me, in her own, familiar way, and wasn’t that all she wanted to do? What, exactly, was wrong with me – why did I hate her for being interested in other people’s lives? Wasn’t I angry that she wasn’t more interested in mine? It was true that when she sat on my bed she rarely asked a question, unless it was about the severity of my pain, or whether I thought I was going to be well enough to attend the service; but that was a kind of anxious sympathy in itself, not to bother me with talking if I’d rather not speak … There was a strange, sticky quality to these feelings, like a sweet I had found unwrapped in a hidden pocket of my bag, half-melted by its contact with the air and speckled with fluff and dirt. Nevertheless, I put the sweet in my mouth.

‘I’ve been making a dress,’ I told her, surprising myself with my confession. ‘It’s not finished. I don’t know if I’ll finish it now – I needed to use your sewing machine, and then I got ill.’

She looked at me, astonished. ‘You’ve been making a dress?’

‘Yes. To wear to the wedding.’

‘Where is it? Can I see it?’ She looked around the room, as if it might have been hanging in plain sight all along.

‘It’s in the wardrobe,’ I said, feeling shabby.

‘Oh.’ She pursed her lips. ‘Well, if you feel like showing it to me, I’d like to see it.’

‘I would like to show it to you. That’s why I brought it up.’

‘Shall I get it? Is it hidden? I don’t like to rummage through your things.’

‘It’s in the drawer. In a Debenhams bag.’

Misgivings had already surged through me. As I watched her bend down with some difficulty to open the drawer and retrieve the bag, the headache from which I had genuinely suffered seemed to fade, and a different kind of ache took its place, one much harder to position. She came back to the bed and drew the dress from the bag.

‘It’s lovely material,’ she said. ‘Can I draw the curtains?’