She hardly remembered him. His was a name followed by silence, if it was ever spoken at all, and it had only been spoken by Joan; occasionally and only when he was alive. She remembered a summer at Strachur, the summer before her mother came back when she and Ian had been up visiting their grandmother. They’d been bouncing a ball down the stairs when their grandmother had come upon them and snapped at them so loud to stop it immediately that she’d made Finetta cry. They were sent outside to play on the lawn. Finetta thought it was the ball that had been the problem – so many precious things, so much that was breakable – but Joan had said no, darling, Fagus – and left it at that, her sentence unfinished. Built over by flats. Why had she never asked? Why had Ian never said? Because that was what her family did, wasn’t it. They never said. They never asked. They just buried everything and built over it with flats, said there was nothing they could do, said sorry we made such a hash of it.

She’d been there when Joan had said that. She’d gone round to the flat in Cumberland Place. She wasn’t sure when the house in Bryanston Square was sold, perhaps during the war, perhaps after. It had survived the bombing – she’d gone to look at it quickly before tea with her aunt, had stood for a moment on the corner of Bryanston Square staring up – she hardly remembered it, really. Black and white tiled hall, large, curving staircase, drawing room with French windows – those snap-shot images were all she had. The flat wasn’t like that. It was crowded with heavy patterns and smoke, Joan with her legs up on a soft footstool, tan stockings, her feet bulging out of slippers; Pat reading the paper, grey-haired, refined, still thin, an air of completion about both of them that left little room for anything else. Finetta hadn’t known where to sit, so she’d made the tea instead, in the little galley kitchen. I’m sorry we made such a hash of it. She’d peeked around the doorway while the kettle boiled and seen Ian sitting close to Joan; he’d pulled his chair up, Joan held his hand. She’d thought she must be dying. No one ever says things like that unless they’re dying and turned off the gas. She’d been right, too. It was the last time either of them had seen her.

Finetta stood quietly behind her mother and watched the dropped face, completely still, nearly dead, not dead enough but almost; her reflection ghostlike in the glass. Her hands lay one over the other in her lap; no ring against that mud-spattered skin. Her finger looked empty without it.