Elaine had three children – ‘I might as well be a single parent,’ she confessed – and was planning to start up a knitwear business. ‘But the goalposts keep moving. Still, with a bit of luck, Neil’s party will stay out of power for years.’ She gave me an honest smile. ‘Welcome to the club, Fanny.’

When I was ready to go home, I went on the hunt for Will and ran him to earth talking to a group of men of about his age, surrounded by a larger ring of admiring women. I touched his arm. For a second or two, it was clear that he had not registered who I was. Then it clicked. ‘Darling.’ He was elated and his eyes were sparkling. ‘You must be exhausted. Look, why don’t I get you a taxi? I’ve got to sort out a few things with Neil over a spot of dinner.’

There were many such evenings.

If Will got back late, he crept in beside me. He offered to sleep on the sofa, but I wouldn’t have it. ‘You belong with me,’ I said, and I didn’t mind if he woke me up with his blundering about in the dark.

Word was spreading about Will that, of his intake, he was a man to watch. ‘The Honourable Member for Stanwinton,’ wrote one political commentator ‘has a whiff of the razzle-dazzle about him.’

After she had read the piece, Elaine rang me: ‘I can hear the knives sharpening. Be warned. Grow a tough skin.’

I cut the article out of the paper and stuck it on to the mirror by the front door. When Will came home, I was in the kitchen, battling with a wave of nausea. One. Two. I leant over the unit. Breathe in. Breathe out.

There was a silence. No ‘Hallo, darling.’ Curious, I poked my head round the kitchen door and caught Will staring into the mirror. Unaware of me, he patted his chin and fussed with his hair. He dug his hands into his pockets, squared his shoulders and took a step back.

‘What on earth…?’ I asked.

He swung round. ‘Just looking,’ he admitted, sheepish yet defiant.

‘Practising,’ I said.

He went bright red. ‘Catching up with myself.’

I slid my arm round his waist. ‘Own up. You were practising for the despatch box.’

Pearl Veriker had sent over the particulars of a house a couple of miles outside the town. ‘This one would do,’ she wrote, in her determined-looking hand, the ‘do’ heavily underlined. That weekend, while Will did his surgery, my father and I went to see it. We drove down a narrow lane, flanked by two big fields under plough, and turned into the driveway of a harsh red-brick house built in late Victorian Gothic style, with a couple of outhouses tacked on to the kitchen.

It was already empty. As I stepped through the front door, I sensed I was entering a place that had been denied fresh air for a long time.

‘Look at it this way,’ said my father, ‘it’s a roof over your head.’

Upstairs, the rooms were better-proportioned and the winter sun was reflected in the large windows. The main bedroom overlooked the ploughed fields in the front. The dun and grey of the soil filled my eyes. Notices had been placed around the perimeters, ‘No walkers’, and at the north end of the field a rookery clotted the branches of the beeches.

My father tugged open a window and prodded at the sill. Sharp and winter-scented, a stream of air invaded the stuffy chill. ‘Fanny…’ he said.

I sensed what was coming. I inspected my hands. They had swollen slightly. So had my waistband and my trousers felt tight around my thighs. Even my shoulders felt bigger. Pregnancy did not agree with me: my body refused to obey orders, which was both puzzling and enraging. The broad-bean-cum-ammonite was neither well behaved nor polite in its colonization of my body.

‘I know what you’re going to say. You need someone for the business who’ll be more on board. I haven’t been doing so well lately.’

‘You can come back,’ he said quickly, ‘after the baby’s born.’

I stared at the depressing fields. ‘Funny how things change, Dad.’ For the sake of a broad bean that was turning into an ammonite.

My father was observing me closely. ‘It makes sense. Having a baby isn’t like going to the dentist – half an hour’s unpleasantness and it’s all over.’

‘I will come back,’ I said. ‘I promise. It’ll be fine. I’ll cope.’ My father looked sceptical. ‘Dad, there’s no question of me giving up work permanently. Will wouldn’t expect it either.’

‘Yes,’ he said, and I read into his inflection a new precariousness, a new treachery even, in my position.

Later, that afternoon, I took Will to see the house. The twilight was kinder on it, dimming its strident colour, and the rooms downstairs were less gloomy in the electric light.

Will was delighted with the house. He pointed out the proportions of the bedrooms and the view over the fields. Downstairs required a lot of work but he was excited by the challenge. ‘I can build shelves,’ he said. ‘And lay floors. I like DIY.’

His energy and enthusiasm were infectious and it was a relief to know we could afford the house and make plans. I stood in the place where he reckoned we should put the kitchen, and looked out at the rookery in the clump of beeches beyond the rather ridiculous Gothic window. Black shapes wheeled in and out of the branches. I told myself that the country was a much better place to bring up a baby and was surprisingly content.

We finished supper early and I was ordered to sit still while Meg, Chloë and my father did the washing-up.

The phone rang. It was Raoul. ‘Fanny, I haven’t heard from you for a long time,’ he said.

‘I was just thinking the same. How’s business? How are Thérèse and the children?’

‘Business could always be better. The French market isn’t flourishing.’

I knew perfectly well from my father’s records that the French suppliers were more than holding their own. ‘How can that be?’ I teased.

‘People are drinking more and more New World wines… I will have to get another job.’

Whichever way you looked at it, the Villeneuves were well cushioned and Raoul would never give up. Cut Raoul and he would bleed Pétrus or Château Longueville.

We talked for half an hour or so: a happy, meandering conversation which flowed neatly past any spectre of an unfinished past.

Eventually, Raoul said, ‘Alfredo tells me that now Chloë is off, you are considering coming back properly into the business. Really, Fanny, this is exceptionally good news.’

‘I’m thinking about it. It all rather depends on what Will’s up to. He’s… um… hoping for big things.’

‘It would make you very happy,’ he said simply. ‘I know it would.’

I allowed myself the merest moment of reprise, of what-might-have-been-possible. ‘Dad tells me that Château d’Yseult has been bought by the Americans. Has that caused a stir?’

‘I think we will get used to it,’ Raoul said. ‘Or, rather, I think we French have to get used to it.’

Chloë’s flight was on the thirteenth of July and I struggled against feeling superstitious.

The day before, we drove over to Ember House to say goodbye to my father. Before lunch, we walked around the garden and came to a halt under the beech in which, many years before, my father had built me a tree-house.

‘Don’t look down,’ I called up to Chloë, who had decided to climb it.

Don’t look down. My father had taught me that – advice that is perfectly obvious once you have received it, but not before.

‘Don’t worry,’ said my father. ‘Let her be.’

‘Stop fussing, Mum.’ Chloë swung herself up into the first fork and straddled the branch. ‘Look at me.’

‘She’s just like you,’ remarked my father fondly.

‘Was I as pig-headed?’

‘Probably I can’t remember.’

I bent down to tip a stone out of my shoe. Tucked into the tree roots were green, vivid moss and the remnants of the miniature cyclamen I had planted over the years. Cyclamen should never be in pots. They belonged outside in the cool, drenched damp of an English spring. ‘I wish she wasn’t going, Dad, but I know she must. It seems a sort of… end.’

‘It isn’t an end, believe me,’ he said, and tucked my hand into his arm. ‘Hang on to that.’

Chloë scrambled up to the second fork in the trunk where, I knew, the bark was smooth and flecked with lichen, and the branches were wide and generous. Perfect for the lonely, perennially grubby girl who had made it her den all those years ago. Chloë hooked her leg over the branch and settled back. ‘I’m probably looking at what you looked at.’

‘Probably.’

She squinted across at the remains of the platform. ‘All the planks look rotten.’

‘Be careful.’ A breeze rippled the leaves. I knew that sound so well. In the end, I had known the pathway up that tree better than the stairs in the house.

‘I drank my first bottle of cider up there,’ I said, to my father, ‘and practised swearing.’

‘I know,’ he said. ‘I used to prowl underneath, just to make sure you were all right.’

‘Really, Dad? I never saw you. I always thought I was the clever one.’

‘And so you were, Francesca.’ He looked pleased with himself. ‘But I wasn’t a complete fool.’

I looked at him. However much I tried to ignore it, my father was growing older. Fright drove a stiletto into me. ‘Why don’t I take some work back with me, if I’m to come back to work properly, why don’t you give me some stuff today?’

He paused and laid his hand on my arm. His touch was a brittle leaf. ‘Why don’t I?’

‘Guys, I’m coming down.’ A moment later Chloë landed beside us. ‘Got moss all over my jeans, Mum. And this is my travelling pair.’

It was not really necessary for me to brush and pat Chloë clean but, since I would not have her for much longer, I allowed myself to fuss. It gave me an excuse to smooth back her hair and run my hands over her shoulders to check they were not too thin. Close your eyes, I told myself. Savour and memorize: imprint the feel of her.