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‘You don't think?’ I gulped hopefully, installed now in his leather chair, sniffing into the red spotty hanky he'd given me.

‘No,’ he consoled, shaking his head as he perched on the edge of his desk beside me, arms folded. ‘She won't impinge on your life. Oh, initially, of course, and out of interest – who wouldn't? – but she'll have her own life. School, friends, family – she's sixteen, for God's sake. She's not suddenly going to decamp and live with you, is she?’

‘I suppose not,’ I said uncertainly.

‘You're imagining the worst. Thinking that life as you know it is over. That the whole cosy Ant, Evie, Anna bit…’

‘Yes!’ I wailed.

‘… is shot to bits, and it's not. And how much better that she's not some grasping tart's offspring, but that of a clever, educated woman? Much more like-minded, much more sane and rational, not some trashy bairn turning up on your doorstep demanding money?’

‘I suppose,’ I agreed doubtfully. ‘Bit more of a threat, though.’ This, in a small voice.

‘Is that what you're worried about?’ Malcolm said kindly.

I nodded mutely, damp eyes trained on lap.

‘That just as you would have felt threatened by her mother seventeen years ago, you'd feel threatened by her daughter now?’

I shrugged, eyes still down. Didn't know what I felt. But yes, all that. And more.

‘You've got your own smart, pretty daughter, chicken,’ he chided gently.

‘Yes. I suppose. So… it's just me, then, who's not. I'm the odd one out.’

I glanced up quickly, then back into my lap, but with time enough to see his fine, sculpted features, which were still delicate and arresting, but these days fretted with fine lines, looking anxiously at me. He sighed.

‘Evie, Ant loves you for what you are. For who you are. You've got to stop living your life wishing you were someone else. Pretending you're someone else.’

I sneaked a look into those wise grey eyes. They were monitoring me closely. ‘You're right,’ I conceded, and I knew he was. I was the one with the problem, the one who felt I wouldn't match up. I felt that Ant would look at his could-have-been family, the mirror image of the one he'd got, and wish he was part of that gang. One of those three musketeers. Malcolm knew me very well.

‘He loves you, Evie, you know that. You don't doubt that, do you?’

‘No.’

‘Never have done?’

‘No.’

‘Well, then.’

I nodded. Well, then.

A silence descended as we sat there together in his little back room. At length, Malcolm shifted off the desk and slipped into the other leather chair opposite me, whilst I sat in Jean's. We still felt it was Jean's, Malcolm and I. Giggled about it. Even though Malcolm had replaced her exploding wicker throne and its squashed, grubby cushions with a smart, antique captain's chair, it still felt a bit wicked. Jean's room: I slid my bottom to the edge of the seat, rested my head on the mahogany back and swivelled around slowly. We'd hardly ever been allowed in here unless it was to unpack books, and certainly never to linger. ‘Come on, chop chop, out you go!’ she'd shrill in her best Sybil voice, shoeing us out with heavily jewelled hands, reeking of Elizabeth Arden. In those days the walls had been relentlessly magnolia and unadorned, apart from a couple of the Gruppenführer's Mabel Lucie Attwell prints. Faded dried flowers had sat in a vase on her desk, together with a twee teddy bear in a jumper, which in true spinsterish style, bore the legend ‘Love me’. Naturally the room reeked of cats. Malcolm had painted it a smart navy blue, added a few choice pieces of furniture, and hung huge framed maps on the walls. He loved those antique maps, and in his quieter moments I'd catch him standing before them, eyes narrowed, plotting his course.

‘Off on a voyage, Malc?’

‘In my beautiful pea-green,’ he'd murmur back. ‘Just need a pussycat.’

I'd smile at the Ancient Mariner's back. For Malcolm was a frustrated sailor, who'd failed to make it into the navy on account of flat feet, but still dreamed of going to sea. Maps, a sea captain's chair, blue walls and a telescope in one corner were as close as he got