Enid closed her eyes again and the phrase span and span, twirling her back to the fire, the sitting room, Evelyn Gardens. At some point, somewhere in the time it had taken her to do nothing, she’d moved from her armchair by the fire, snow on the ground outside, Ian and Finetta playing in the room next door. She’d got up and done something. She must have. She must have carried on living, or how else could she be here? A package had arrived a while later, forwarded again by Douglas – Fagus’ belongings, the coroner’s report, another scribble from Miss Barnes.

“Mother.”

A file, papers, his things. She’d put them away. She’d put them on a shelf.

“Mother?”

Seven years after Fagus’ death, on the eve of another war, a bookend to the first, which wrapped the collapse of her family in the hands of something greater, she’d stood in Court 14 of the chancery division for the last time.

Finetta was already gone: to Vienna, to a finishing school far away, where she’d stayed even after school was done. Ian was in his last year at Eton; he was grown into a young man alive with the prospect of life; a man unrecognisable from the little boy who’d hidden beneath the bed and made her knuckles bleed. She hardly saw him; only when she could, when tea at school was a court order and he sat not eating, lounging in his chair in whatever tea rooms she’d insisted on, smoking while she asked, shall I be mother?

God knows what she’d done in the years between; how she’d lived, who she’d been, what little silly, daily trinkets had filled her waking hours. Washing, eating, reading books; she must have done all those things. She’d sat for Augustus John – she knew that had happened, because she had the picture to prove it: her head half-turned, her hand in mid-gesture as if she’d been saying something, though she could never remember what, nor how she got there, or what she’d done after or before. The before and after, the months and years of life were a blur of dark rooms and emptiness. They were loss. All of them, except the day of the final court hearing.

That day was not a blur to her at all; that day she remembered with clarity. The weather – it had been fine, she’d worn a cotton dress with forget-me-nots printed on it, and a scarf, draped over her shoulders because she knew the courtroom was cold. The smell of that room – ever musty with a tang of sweat. The look of the benches lined against the back wall: narrow, cramped, uncomfortable. The chairs and tables set on the parquet floor at the front, for Smithson and Crowther to cough over, rest their files upon and look through their papers for the very last time.