‘I’m not talking about Ursula. My mother was called something else, and there are no photographs of her in this house. I burned them all after Father died. I couldn’t do it before then because he would have objected, but I did it afterwards. I burned them or I cut her out of the pictures with my needlework scissors. You wouldn’t have known about her because I don’t speak about her at all. I haven’t said her name in more than twenty years. She was a despicable, wicked, unkind woman who abused Isobel and I will never forgive her for it.’ She rubbed her hair again, tangling it even more. ‘And I look like her and every time I catch my reflection in a mirror she is in this house again and I cannot bear it.’

Keith straightened up. He didn’t know what to say.

‘And now look at me. I’ve made it worse, if that were even possible.’ She lifted up a wedge of hair. ‘How am I going to sort this out before Friday? Beatrice Sidcup will have a field day with her opinions about how I look.’

Keith ran his forefinger gently across the back of her neck. ‘Perhaps we need Isobel’s advice?’

‘She has gone to help Agnes at number 38 this morning and won’t be back until lunchtime.’ Ann glared at her own reflection. ‘My mother has been dead for more than two decades, but she is still having a malicious effect on me, on this house, on everything. I should have sold the place as soon as I inherited it.’

He shook his head slowly. ‘I’m sure it feels like that at the moment, but I’m afraid I don’t agree. If you had sold it, then when I knocked at the door looking for work it would have been someone else who answered and we would never have met.’

‘I suppose . . .’

‘And,’ he continued, warming to his theme, ‘you would have bought a little flat to live in by yourself and there would have been no room for Isobel when she needed a home. That plum tree down the garden might have been cut down to make way for a summer house, instead of giving us spiced fruit for our pies. And most importantly, Mrs Beatrice Stuckup wouldn’t have been able to find you and you wouldn’t have that letter about your brother.’

Gradually, Ann began to feel calmer. Everything he said was true and she wasn’t thinking logically at all, which, for someone who loved nothing better than a proper plan and a good list to go with it, was most out of character. ‘You know, you really should stop calling her that. I am quite likely to say it in front of her and then where would we be?’

‘I’ll try to remember.’