While the girl with the poor complexion handed out tea, Enid leaned her head back and remembered. Nineteen years old, on a tour of Italian churches with her sister and aunt, and Douglas was, what? seventeen? Simple and handsome, sent away by his mother to meet people, presumably people a step up from a politician’s son. She could see it now, how she’d dropped her guidebook and he’d picked it up, how he’d told her his name, and she’d thought: never heard of you. They’d made conversation while watching her aunt get her skirts tangled in the door of the gig, and laughed out loud and covered their mouths when the skirt had ripped and her aunt had been stranded with her leg out.

Somebody was holding her arm.

“There we are,” said Mandy, “up you get.”

“I don’t want to get up.”

“I’ll try her again if you like,” said Dawn, picking up the telephone and dialling the number.

“And I’ll take you down to the lounge,” said Mandy.

“I don’t want to go to the lounge,” said Enid. Lounge was a verb, not a noun, and on a normal day she would have pointed this out, but energy seeped from her like a plug pulled and she couldn’t see. Her legs felt too weak to hold her up – she clung onto Mandy’s arm. When they reached the top of the stairs, she said, “It wasn’t my fault.”

Mandy put Enid’s hand on the bannister rail. “Have you spilled something?”

Enid took a step down. “I won’t be accused.” They took another step; Enid’s stick, looped over her arm, swung between them.

Mandy patted her hand. “I’m sure it won’t matter. I’ll send Dawn along with a cloth. You can tell her what happened after lunch.”

Enid’s grip slipped but Mandy caught her. She let go and stood for a minute on the third step down, pulled her hankie from her pocket and wiped her mouth. “I had no choice.”

She’d sworn it was better to concrete it over. On new surface she’d constructed a story of her own and built into the walls a pact to hide his memory in death as she’d hidden his body in life. But after all these years, uncontrollably, the surface split, the buildings fell and the layers peeled back, through court and birth to the moment it began, before Ian was born, when his brother’s sweet, round face looked right at her.

Enid, 1921

4

Enid, 1921