Tess walks over to the staircase which leads to the office and puts her foot on the first step. The uncarpeted stairs are steep and narrow, and painted chocolate brown; it looks as though they haven’t had any attention for many, many years. Her feet clatter on the bare wood. It would have been impossible, she thinks, for a bone-tired servant to nip up the stairs quietly and grab a few minutes to herself. There would have been no privacy in her daily life at all.

She gets to the top and turns the brass doorknob.

A long bench, made from what looks like sanded scaffolding planks, runs along one wall below the window. Beneath it is a pair of utilitarian two-drawer filing cabinets. The room is above the scullery with its sinks and stone floor and seems to have no heating at all apart from a small electric blow heater. She tries to imagine what it would have been like to be the maid here. The cream wallpaper is speckled with brown, and near the ceiling is a paper border that runs all around the room. Cream and mint and coffee. ‘Very 1930s,’ she says out loud.

At the end of the room is a wall of photographs. Each one shows a young woman, standing beside Georgia; they have all been taken in the garden with the scullery door as a backdrop. Judging by the clothes, they span from the 1960s to a few years ago. These, Tess realises, are her predecessors: Georgia’s lodgers. She leans closer to look at them. I wonder where they are now, she thinks, sent off into the world with unexpected funds to make a new start. She finds Fiona, a nervous-looking girl, squinting into the sunlight of a summer day. Did they remember Georgia with fondness, she wonders, or was she just a footnote, a passing acquaintance? The last photo is of a tall girl, looking confident, smiling into the camera. ‘Is this you, Nicola?’ she says.

She drags herself away from the photographs, and turns to look at the workbench, and the Apple computer with its pristine white keyboard and equally white mouse set out neatly, ready to use.

‘A fruitarian to your core, Georgia, of course you are. Granny Smith all the way.’

Chapter 74

September 2011

The filing cabinets are not locked, and Tess discovers that everything is neatly itemised and tabbed, albeit according to Georgia’s rather idiosyncratic system.

There are files labelled ‘NECESSARY’ and ‘THINK’ and ‘DELICIOUS’. On a shelf above the planks is a long row of black diaries with the date on each spine. The first one is dated 1951. Without thinking Tess takes it down from the shelf and opens it.