Finetta was busy with her bird book, bent over it, sticking in pictures. She didn’t look up. Tape and scissors lay on the floor beside her. Joan had sent it to her for Christmas; it was enormous, with hard covers in green fabric and large empty green paper pages, waiting for things to be stuck in it. Finetta had chosen birds, which was lucky, because when Enid had seen it she’d said a scrap book, you could stick – and then hadn’t been able to think of anything. For Ian, Joan had sent a mass of little things, all wrapped individually – little tin cars and trains and soldiers. He kept them under the bed, she’d seen them there. Finetta said he was opening one package at a time, one every week or something. Nothing had come from Scotland; or perhaps her mother had sent packages to Bryanston Square for him to open there. She didn’t know. She didn’t want to know.

Just as she had at Didlington, she’d written a number of times to her mother, and a number of times torn the letters up. What could she say? Help me? If her mother cared, she’d have held her hand while she cried in the window seat at Cherry Trees, a clean dress on, her hair brushed for the first time in days, Ian on show in the cot, Finetta held by Mary. She wouldn’t have smiled and clapped her hands and turned her face the other way. She wouldn’t have given everything to Joan when she knew Enid had nothing. She’d have come to Didlington Hall. She’d have come to Evelyn Gardens. She’d have tried to comfort her.

But she hadn’t. Nothing had come from her mother, no attempt at correspondence, not even letters of rage. The silence was like a wall that she couldn’t stop looking at.

“Come and have tea, Finetta.”

“Yes, Mamma.” Finetta closed her book and got up. She followed Enid to the sitting room where Peel had put the tea things – a large pot, two cups, a plate of herring sandwiches.

“Would you like to pour?”

Finetta had her hair in pigtails; she’d learnt to do it all herself. She must have read it in a book somewhere, a girls’ annual or something. Peel took them to the library sometimes, a concept that Enid had needed explaining. Whose library? she’d said. The public library, ma’am. Oh, Enid had replied. Well, if she wouldn’t take them to church, then it would have to do.