My card was declined while I was buying nappies for my baby. My husband told me to figure it out myself. His mother called me a useless leech. So I rang my late father's banker and said one sentence.

He has apologised for it four times. Twice badly.

PART 2

And then there was movement on the line.

His mother had taken the phone off him, which is a thing she has been doing since about 2019 and which neither of them has ever once remarked on.

Rosamund was standing four feet behind me at the time.

She had come with me that afternoon.

She had asked to. She rang at about half past nine that morning and said she would like to come out with us, which she had not done in about eleven months.

I was pleased about it. I want that in here, because of what she said an hour later and because of what I found out nine days after that.

I was genuinely pleased that my mother-in-law wanted to come to the shops with me and the baby, and I put lipstick on.

She had her hand on my wrist before I had got the phone down.

And she said it loudly enough for the whole queue and the next two tills.

You useless leech.

Three words, in a supermarket, from a woman of sixty-two in a camel coat, to a woman holding a phone with the call still connected.

Nobody moved. Somebody put a basket down on the floor.

She did not let go. She leaned in and she said: put it all back.

There were about twenty people within hearing.

Two of them were looking at the nappies on the belt rather than at either of us, which I understood completely and which I would also have done.

One woman, about my age, with a toddler in a trolley, took four steps closer and then stopped and did not come any further.

She stood there for the rest of it. She did not say anything and she did not look away either, and when I left she was still standing in the same place. I have thought about her more than I have thought about most of the people I know.

I did not cry. I did not argue with anybody and I did not say one word to that woman.

I put the trolley to one side myself, over by the magazines, because somebody has to and because it was not going to be that girl.

I said sorry to the cashier. She said nothing at all. She looked like she wanted to be dead and she was about twenty-two and none of it was hers.