‘No soup!’ repeated Thisbe, and lay down on the floor, ready to start a tantrum.

‘No, we’ll find some bread and butter.’

Rationing had not yet affected them here, so far from the towns; there was plenty of food in Cumberland or there would have been if there had been any money to buy it with and not all the villagers turned away from Ruth; some had been helpful. But, of course, Penelope believed in ‘Nature’, not realizing how very unnatural good husbandry really is. Three damp chickens which did not lay wandered into the house, soiling the flagstones; old milk, dripping through discoloured muslin, failed dismally to turn into cheese.

The boys now returned noisily from school. Peter, whom she had pleased by hitting him on the leg in the far-off days on Hampstead Heath, and Tristram, a year older.

‘Oh God, not mother’s muck,’ said Tristram. ‘I won’t eat it, and she needn’t think it.’

Ruth, fetching bread, butter and apples from the larder, reassured him. If only it didn’t get dark so soon. When they’d first come, she’d been able to go out with the boys after supper while they kicked a ball around or searched for conkers, but now they all faced an interminable evening sitting round the smoking Aladdin lamp. Even so she could manage if only Penelope stayed next door at her loom. They could play dominoes or ludo — at least they could if the pieces weren’t lost again; she wasn’t as nimble as she had been at crawling round the floor looking for missing toys after the children were in bed.

But, of course, Penelope did come in, concerned for her motherhood, and within minutes the boys were at each other’s throats and Thisbe was lying on the floor drumming her heels. Too many sages had made their way into Penelope Hartley’s head: Rudolf Steiner who said children should not learn to read till their milk teeth were shed; the Sufi chieftain who set Penelope to her meditations instead of the washing up; A. S. Neill with his child-centred education. The poor, confused children of Penelope Hartley were so child-centred that they almost imploded each night in the confines of the tiny cottage — and tonight, as so often before, Ruth who was supposed to finish her work at seven, carried Thisbe upstairs and eased her into her nappies and sat with her till she slept.

And then the long evening began when she went to her attic under the eaves which was at least her own and looked out at the darkness and the rain, and longed for her mother and the lore and certainties of her own childhood and the painted cradle, now splintered wood, in which her baby should have lain.

But she wouldn’t yield. It wasn’t so long now — less than two months. She would see it through on her own. Not whose I am, but who I am, there lies my search… The lines of some half-remembered poem ran again through her head.

Only who was she? Someone who had loved and been rejected; a daughter who had caused her parents disappointment and pain… and now, soon, a mother who knew nothing.

And yet she had no regrets. She blamed no one, not even Verena, hissing her ultimatum in the cloakroom, threatening to expose her condition unless she left Thameside then and there, and for ever. In a way Verena had done her a service, bringing home the contempt and disgust with which the world might now regard her state. If her father, so strict, so upright, had turned his back on her as a fallen woman, Ruth couldn’t have borne it: she’d have revealed the marriage and then it would have all have begun… finding Quin, letting him know… begging for a place in his life… And Verena had kept her own side of the bargain; no one at college knew what had happened or where she was.

Nor had Quin carried her dreamily from his sofa to his bed. He had said: ‘Wait; there are things to be attended to.’ He had said it very gently, very lovingly, cupping her face in his hands, but firmly: he had begun to leave her, and it was she who had clung on to him and said: ‘No, no, you mustn’t go!’… because even then she couldn’t bear to be away from him. ‘It’s absolutely safe,’ she’d said. ‘It’s my completely safe time; I know because of Dr Felton’s wife and the thermometers. It’s as safe as houses!’

She hadn’t been lying; she’d believed it and he’d believed her. Only houses, these days, were not so very safe: houses in Guernica and Canton and Warsaw toppled like cards as bombs fell on them, and she’d been wrong. She’d been a whole week out in her calculations and that was another mark chalked up to Fräulein Lutzenholler and Professor Freud. She wasn’t usually sloppy about dates — it was that damnable thing way below the level of reason which all along had wanted nothing except to belong to this one man.

And even now, an official ‘unmarried mother’ from whom the older villagers averted their eyes, even now when Quin had unmistakably rejected her, there was, deep down below the anxiety and fear for the future, an unquenchable sense of joy because she was carrying his child.

Only the child itself had lately disconcerted her. This fishlike creature still unable to breathe or eat except by her decree, had developed a will of its own. Ruth did not need the doctors in the antenatal clinic to which she travelled once a fortnight on innumerable buses, to tell her that her baby was fit and well, but what about its mental state — its obstinacy? It disagreed completely with Ruth’s careful plans and was profoundly uninterested in her voyage of self-discovery.

Bowmont is only sixty miles away, it said, twisting its foot merrily round her spinal nerves. You may be an upstart and an outcast, but I’m half a Somerville.

I want, it said, my home.

At the end of November, Leonie received a visit from Mrs Burtt who had left the Willow to work in a munitions factory and was greatly missed by the customers. Smartly dressed in a new brown coat and a hat with a feather, she was carrying a small parcel wrapped in silver paper and seemed a little shy and tentative which was not her usual state.

‘I’m sorry to be bothering you,’ she said, ‘but… well, I thought you wouldn’t mind; you wouldn’t take it amiss.’

‘How could I do this?’ asked Leonie. ‘I am very happy to see you.’

She led Mrs Burtt into the sitting room, in which one could actually sit once more now that the piano had been sent back, and offered coffee which Mrs Burtt refused.

‘I don’t want to pry,’ she said, after asking rather oddly if they would be undisturbed. ‘But well, I really like her, you know, and people sometimes say things, but I know Ruth is as good as they make them. And her going off like that to have it on her own… well, it’s like her. Not wanting to bother anyone. But I want her to know that whatever she’s done I know she’s a good girl and I’d like you to give this to her. Afterwards. Not before, because that’s bad luck, but when it’s all over. I knitted it myself.’

She laid the parcel on the table, and Leonie, who was having trouble with her breathing, stretched out her hand. ‘May I see?’ she said.

Mrs Burtt removed the wrapping paper. Pride shone for a moment on her face. ‘Took me hours, that did. It’s a brute of a pattern. It’s those scallops, see? But it’s come out nice, hasn’t it? I kept it white to be on the safe side, but she can put a blue ribbon through it or a pink when it’s all over.’

Leonie was still having difficulty with the business of drawing air into her lungs. ‘Thank you — she will be so pleased. It is the most beautiful jacket. I will see that she has it… and tell her… what you have said.’

Mrs Burtt nodded. ‘I don’t want to know any more now,’ she said. ‘It’s not my business. Just to know she’s all right and the baby’s safe.’

Leonie, swallowing the unbearable hurt her daughter had done her, said: ‘Did she tell you… herself… about the baby?’

Mrs Burtt shook her head ‘Bless you, no. She’s no blabber. But I was one of four daughters and I’ve three girls of my own. I guessed soon enough. There’s ways of being sick that’s a bug in the tummy and there’s ways that isn’t. And she got so tired. I came out with it and I think it was a relief she could talk to someone.’

‘And… where she was going… her plans? Did she tell you about that?’

‘No. And I didn’t ask her. I knew it wasn’t Heini that was the father, so there wasn’t any more for me to say.’

Leonie lifted her head. ‘How did you know?’ she asked.

‘Well, you could see she didn’t love ’im, couldn’t you? Tried too hard all the time… And if it wasn’t him, I wasn’t going to go nosing around.’

‘I didn’t see… as well as you,’ said Leonie out of her deep despair.

Mrs Burtt’s work-roughened hand rested for a moment on her own. ‘You was so close, the two of you,’ she said. ‘You loved her so much. It’s a real killer, love is, if you want to see.’

Left alone, Leonie sat as still as a statue, holding the exquisite, tiny garment in her hands. Ruth had not trusted her. She had confided in a lady who washed dishes and not in her. She had gone off alone.

Professor Berger, returning home, found her still in a state of shock.

‘What has happened, Leonie? What have you got there?’

‘It’s a baby’s jacket.’ She traced the scallops on the collar, the lacy frill, with blind fingers. ‘Mrs Burtt brought it for Ruth.’

She watched as her husband’s face changed; saw the incredulity, the dismay… then the tightness of anger.

‘My God, that scoundrel, Heini. I’ll force him to marry her,’ he said furiously.

‘Oh, Kurt, it isn’t Heini’s child. If it was she’d have gone with him.’

This was worse. His beloved, protected daughter a fallen woman, the bearer of an unknown child. Pitying him as he paced the room, Leonie had no energy to retrieve him from his conventional hell of moral outrage. What is it I have not understood? she thought. What is it that is missing here? And if I was right all along, how could it have come to this?