If his brother had been perfect there’d have been no need for him. She’d said it then and she said it now. Forty-two years ago, she’d sat in the window seat of Cherry Trees, a clean dress on, her hair brushed for the first time in days. She’d stared at her new-born son while nanny held Finetta, and cried helplessly while her mother clapped her hands and looked the other way, while Douglas looked embarrassed.

Her heart spasmed, and she had to clutch her chest. He couldn’t come. It was unacceptable. He couldn’t just turn up as if he’d seen her yesterday and expect everything to have been kept on ice for him, as if she’d died when he’d left and could only be woken by his forgiveness. As if he had a right to stand in judgement. He didn’t know. He’d been too young to understand.

She dug her hands into her hips – bony and collapsed, no hint of the widening softness that had made way for children. Giving birth had ruined them. There. She’d said it. Try me, she thought, as if staring a bull in the face. Just see if I can’t think of those episodes of carnage. But her chest spasmed again and she had to open her mouth to breathe. She tried lying on her side but it didn’t help. She might get it into her head to cry and she hadn’t done that since he was born.

She sat up slowly and swung her feet to the floor, took her stick from where it hooked over the plastic rail of her bedstead and walked slowly across the room.

On the white walls of the corridor hung cheap prints of generic vistas: a seascape, a landscape; places no one had been. The floor was carpeted in green. To her left, the corridor ended in another room. To her right, it twisted out of sight down a small flight of stairs. She approached the first step, grabbed the wooden handrail and lowered her foot. Her knee gave quickly and she was thrown forward, but the other foot came spinning out to her rescue and caught her light weight. She stood for a minute on the second step, breathless. Her hand shook like her mother’s used to; a bell that wouldn’t stop ringing.