“See,” said Maisie, and she opened the palm of her hand to show the stones. Immediately she closed her fingers round them and whipped the stones away. She took them everywhere. Even when she slept, Maisie kept a few chips of marble that had been flung on her husband’s grave clenched tight in a handkerchief in her fist.

“I notice first,” said Maisie Adams, “people’s lips.” She fell into a doe-eyed reverie. “Maybe that’s why I chose him.” She laughed. “He was tasty in every way.”

“Were you happy with Daddy?” Sara interrupted.

“I married your father,” her mother answered vehemently, “and that was that. He was twice my age. And so . . .” she hesitated, “so correct! So intelligent.” She laughed unashamedly. “I don’t believe he thought he was mortal.”

She looked at them.

“I had no ambitions for myself.”

Such selflessness angered the girls. But then her voice changed, warning them off. She began to look different, as if she had spent the last twenty-eight years in a different role. Now she seemed intent on picking herself up as she might have been. And the Jonathan Adams they knew had gone missing somehow. She dabbed her lips politely with her handkerchief, then took two long breaths and coughed, her knuckles pressed into her chest.

“I used to climb out of the back window of the kitchen quarters in Brookborough to see him,” she said, drawing her knees in. “I always liked a man in a uniform.”

Again came the unwholesome lusty laugh.

“Poor Jonathan!” Then she added. “And poor Matti Bonner.”

And though their mother was again speaking of their father, this merging of her present life with her younger self threatened the girls. She began to ask them intimate details of their love lives. From upstairs they heard the visiting women burst out into gales of laughter. Maisie Adams had, in a frightening way, returned to grow up alongside her daughters.