Harriet dodged the delicate china cup, full of tea, that flew past her and shattered on the wall behind.

‘Tea is supposed to be hot,’ her mother screamed. ‘HOT. Not tepid. You know I hate tepid anything, you stupid bitch.’

Harriet turned and watched for a second or two as the dark brown liquid streamed down the cream wall like dirty tears.

‘When will she be here? When will you get off your useless backside and do something?’

‘Mother, I’ve told you—’

‘I don’t want to hear it.’ The old woman cupped her hands over her ears. ‘I don’t want to hear you or see you. I never wanted you.’

Harriet turned and walked out of the bedroom without uttering a word, closing the door quietly behind her.

Her mother continued to scream insults as Harriet walked calmly back downstairs humming ‘Annie’s Song’ and thinking about John Denver’s lovely, kind face. She could still hear the obscenities back in the lounge with the door closed and her earplugs in.

It was all so unnecessary.

Harriet sat down in front of the antique writing desk and took some deep breaths. As she felt the wave of pain rising, she closed her eyes against it, trying to form a barricade against the disappointing person that she was.

She smoothed her hands over the desk’s fine oak planes, still glowing with quality after all these years. This wonderful piece of furniture had belonged to her father. The desk was the only tangible thing left of him, her mother had made sure of that.

Harriet had vivid memories of hiding behind the couch, clutching moth-eaten Ted and watching her mother stuff bag after black bin bag full of her father’s suits, shirts and shoes. Then she’d been made to help drag them out into the back yard, where they’d sat for months on end, disintegrating in the inclement weather.

But when Harriet sat there at her father’s desk, she almost felt part of him again. Lately, she’d felt a thread of steel growing within her, dissolving the pain of her mother’s disappointment. Silently guiding her, giving her hope.

Tonight though, Harriet felt an unwelcome prickling in her chest.

Harriet liked to call herself a teacher but she hadn’t gone on to higher education in the end. She’d left college to become a trainee teaching assistant – ‘a teacher’s lackey’, her mother called it.

She was so much more capable than most of the trained teachers at St Saviour’s, but because she hadn’t got a piece of paper from a university to validate her, her skills counted for virtually nothing.

Life would have been different if her father had been alive. She should have gone to university to study and her father would have supported that.

He’d tripped on an uneven paving stone and stumbled under the wheels of a red London bus on Oxford Street when Harriet was just five years old. The age all her children in her class were now.

Her mother had never liked London, and after the death of Harriet’s father, she couldn’t get away from the city quickly enough.

They’d made the move to Nottingham within months, her mother snapping up a creaky old Victorian villa on a dreary back street in Lenton, an area she selected solely because it appeared in the Domesday Book in the late eleventh century.

A village back then, Lenton had been quite well-to-do at one time, but over the years the nearby houses had slowly been converted into bedsits and now they found themselves surrounded by students at every turn. But Mother steadfastly refused to move out of the area and into something smaller and more manageable.

‘I’ll leave this house when they carry me out in a box and not a moment before,’ she liked to taunt Harriet.

Harriet sat up straighter and twisted the ornate brass handle in front of her, gently pulling the front flap of the desk down. A dozen tiny compartments and drawers faced out, intricate and pleasing to the eye. The desk reminded her of the human psyche. Deceptively simple on the outside but once you peeled the outer layer away, all manner of complexities were revealed inside.

Harriet remembered only too well how it felt to be a young child experiencing the rawness of tragedy whilst trying to cope with the tumultuous change that often followed it. The only way to get through it was to develop an invisible sheath of armour that would stop you hurting ever again. The trick was to develop it at a young enough age for it to be effective.

She slid open a long, narrow drawer and extracted a key. When her mother took her bath, Harriet would climb to the third floor of the creaking old house and continue her preparations on the room. She would make sure everything was just perfect for when their guest arrived. She’d come to realise it was the only way to placate her mother.

In the meantime, Harriet had an important telephone call to make.