Carol carried the tray to the door and put it on the trolley that she’d parked in the corridor. She came back in, closed the door behind her and walked heavily over to Enid. She placed her plump hand on Enid’s shoulder.

“A little comb through, shall we?” Carol’s cheeks were so large that when she smiled her face creased into an undulating mass and her pig eyes nearly disappeared completely. Joan had been fat too. Not as fat as Carol, but large enough to make every item of clothing look as if it were screaming. Last time she saw her, she’d been squeezed into a blue suit and squashed onto a bench in court, Pat clinging to her side. Lesbians. Enid would have used the word if she’d thought she’d have been believed, but she knew, she’d known then, that their mother would have deployed her favourite weapon of looking the other way.

She felt Carol’s hand drop from her shoulder. In the reflection of the window she watched her fetch a comb from the sink and felt it softly tug through her hair. Enid tilted her head and rested it in Carol’s hands, lifting her gaze to the pattern of the trees outside – limbs bare against a pallid grey – and then higher still to the edge of the window and the ceiling above her, white-painted and empty but for the strip light, flickering on low. Carol said, “Keep still,” and untangled a knot.

She hadn’t reckoned on being reminded, when it was all too late, that everything they’d done was based on grief.

“Perhaps you’d like to change into something clean?” said Carol.

I’ll pay you £500 if you give him up. But she hadn’t known that Joan meant: and never see him again. If she had known, no money on earth would have been worth it.

“I could look out your blue one with the collar.”

Twenty-five years ago. He’d be in his forties by now.

“Enid?” Carol touched her arm.

Enid felt the light press on her sleeve but all she could see was her son in the back of her sister’s Rolls Royce as it eased slowly down the narrow street, paused briefly at the end, turned left and accelerated out of sight. She’d pretended, for a while, that he’d come and see her. It had eased her mind. There’d been no reason why he shouldn’t; she was still his mother. She gripped the arm of her chair. If Joan had been forced through the imprisonment of marriage and brutality of childbirth, perhaps she’d have done the same, but she hadn’t and so how foolish to think she’d have understood.

“Enid?” Carol gently shook her arm, her face close. “Everything all right?”

“What?” Enid’s voice was cracked from under-use.