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with the news. Charlotte, my beloved, please try to understand…’
    His voice tailed off into silence at the icy contempt blazing at him from her eyes. She stared stonily down at the hunched figure sitting on the bed as though he were a complete stranger and, without uttering a word, walked out of the room.
    When Olu eventually left the house, Charlotte took refuge in her bed and stayed there, unable to speak to anyone. Refusing to see Olu, or answer his frantic phone calls, or even talk to her anxious friends, she lay staring silently at the ceiling, only getting out of bed to use the bathroom or to go to the kitchen to make yet another cup of peppermint tea to relieve the nausea that constantly threatened to overwhelm her. This continued for several days until one of her flatmates, coming home from her shift, found her lying in a heap on the kitchen floor and frantically called an ambulance. By the time they reached St Luke’s, it was too late to save her baby. Following an overheard phone call with his wife, who was anxious to find out why his return had been delayed, Olu’s guilty secret was soon public knowledge. Unable to stand the undisguised contempt of the hospital staff, he abruptly terminated his contract and returned home to his unsuspecting wife.
    Confessing to her flatmates that she felt alone and couldn’t bear to go home to face the inevitable “I told you so’s” from her parents, Charlotte decided to escape the hospital and its memories of Olu. She scoured the newspapers and the cards on the windows of the local newsagents, desperate to find a job that would give her the chance for a new start, until finally she spotted a small advertisement in the daily paper for a housekeeper. The job involved looking after a widower who had recently come to England with his two young children and, intrigued by the sound of the vacancy, she phoned the recruitment agency.
    At her interview, Dr Bonsu, who was already impressedby Charlotte’s obvious intelligence and nursing background, was won over when he saw Faye’s reaction to the tall young woman with sad eyes. His daughter had suffered the double trauma of losing her mother and changing countries, and was still extremely wary and shy around people. For Charlotte, the tiny five-year-old with huge eyes and stubby plaits covered in multicoloured ribbons could have been an older version of the baby she had pictured in her mind so often during her short-lived pregnancy. To her father’s astonishment, and as though somehow sensing their mutual need for comfort, Faye had immediately taken to the angular dark-haired woman with shiny brown eyes, and spontaneously reached up to hug her.
    Dr Bonsu explained to Lottie that, as an international medical consultant in a very specialised field, his job required him to travel constantly.
    â€˜When my children and I first arrived here,’ he explained, ‘we were accompanied by my cousin who was supposed to live with us and look after the children. Unfortunately, Sophia missed her friends and the active social life she had enjoyed in Ghana too much.’
    Sophia, the doctor admitted, had complained incessantly about the cold weather – it was mid-July – and had eventually packed her bags and taken the next flight back home.
    Shortly after her interview, Charlotte was offered the job and moved immediately into the large house in Hampstead with the Bonsu family, where she was soon known simply as Lottie. Although she never mentioned his name, Charlotte’s experience with Olu had left her extremely bitter and cynical about the intentions of everymember of the male sex. Making it clear to anyone who approached her that she had absolutely no time for men in her life, she instead concentrated her efforts on making sure that her adopted family was well cared for.
    Now, shaking her head as she took in Faye’s misery, Lottie dumped the clothes she had retrieved from the floor