“My stick,” said Enid. Mandy handed it to her. “I told you she was difficult.”

“Your Finetta?” said Mandy, taking her arm. “Anyone’d be grateful to have such a daughter. Prompt as anything, always bringing something.”

But there was so much Finetta didn’t understand.

“You told her it was perfectly all right?” said Enid.

“I told you, Enid. She wasn’t there. But she’ll be here any minute. You can ask her then.”

“It will be too late by then.”

“Do you want to wait in your room? The fire’s lit.”

“If he doesn’t come, I’ll never know.”

“Perhaps your Finetta can tell you.”

“She doesn’t know. She doesn’t know anything.” Enid stumbled on the step to the next corridor.

“Perhaps you’d be best waiting in the office with us. We can keep an eye on you.”

In the office, Enid was placed in the same chair, near the window, side-on to the end of the desk that was scattered with cups and paper clips. Dawn crossed one fat leg over the other as she wrote something down in a file. Mandy flicked through a desk diary.

“You have to call.” She tapped the plastic wood with her fingernail. “He’s the only one who knows.”

He’d know because his father would have told him. Douglas would have handed over files, perfect explanations of events that included plot numbers. Dawn’s chair squeaked and the girl with the poor complexion came in. “Can you help with the tea? They’re clamouring.”

Is that how these girls thought of them, the inmates in this brick prison of failed prayers – just stupid animals clamouring for distraction? Didn’t they know they would be old one day too?

“I’ll sit with you,” said Mandy, as Dawn got up to the sigh and slow rise of her office chair.

Finetta had stayed home in that house of narrow corridors, the shabby environs of Fulham, locked with her bird book and Peel – who’d doubled as a reluctant governess for a few pennies more, and taught her house-keeping, while Ian went to and fro across London. All those years – could they have known it would go on so long? Affidavits and witness stands, letters, endless letters, arranging this and arguing that. Douglas had married his mistress and had a daughter. Ian was sent to school. Fagus had carried on, unvisited and unseeing, put to bed in a dorm and sung to by a housemaid, and through those years Ian had shrunk from her and grown into a young man, while Finetta had bloomed and wilted. Enid stared at the office floor. She saw her feet in neat brown shoes, her hands unfolding in her lap, her rise to the witness stand.

Enid, 1930

35

Enid, 1930