After a few trips, I had amassed in my bedroom three metres of broderie anglaise, two kinds of thread, a roll of greaseproof paper, a pattern and a roll of calico for practising with, which, along with the sewing kit I dug out from the bottom of the wardrobe, should have been everything I was going to need. Everything, that is, but the sewing machine.

Gemma lived two hundred miles away, and we had not spoken since our final exams. I knew nobody else except my mother who owned a machine. Buying one of my own would have been prohibitively expensive: I was temping as a secretary at the time, work which somehow contrived to pay slightly less than minimum wage, and what I didn’t surrender in room and board to my parents was digging me out of an overdraft the bank kept threatening to dissolve. Even if I could have got my hands on my own machine, they were terribly noisy, which left me the same problems I would face if I chose to use my mother’s: namely, finding a time when I could sew without detection.

As I mulled this problem over, I was not idle: I did as much as I could behind closed doors, in my bedroom, which had barely changed in my three years away, except that a chest emptied of clothes had been removed to my brother’s room. This gave me more space to spread my materials out. I measured myself several times with a floppy fabric tape measure: bust and waist, hips and shoulders. I cut greaseproof panels and tacked them together, then calico panels, and slipped the rig gingerly over my head, warming to the tiny adjustable demands of my ambition, while downstairs my mother cooked dinners from which I excused myself, or watched one of the police dramas she liked so much, and my brother lay lost in the violent immersive dreams of his video games.

Candice and her mother, my Auntie Manda, were often round at our house, ostensibly for the purposes of wedding planning, but also to bask in my mother’s envy (the whole marriage business ran on envy, it seemed to me, like a car running on fumes). If I left my door ajar, which I could safely do when there was company downstairs, I could clearly hear them talking above the hiss and snip of the scissors.

‘I went to that bakery you told me about,’ Candice might say, addressing my mother, who for someone professing not to like cake had been surprisingly full of suggestions, ‘and we tried a few samples, didn’t we, but the quality just wasn’t that good.’

‘Much too sweet,’ Auntie Manda would agree, sounding faintly offended. ‘Really sickly.’