Fagus tugged on her hand and she smiled vaguely, not looking at him, letting her eyes travel from the paving stones to the house instead. It wasn’t that it wasn’t pretty; Strachur stood its ground in broad blocks of stone and ordered windows: eight on either side of the central body which rounded proud of the rest, as if the house stuck out its chest and belly for the height of all four floors. It was liveable, it was doable, but it was just a house – a second-rate version of the life they’d lived before. Douglas called it grand. Joan called it functional. To Enid it was simply A.M. – After Marriage.

Everything that had happened After Marriage had been bad. Or, to put it another way, after she’d got married, everything had gone bad. There was the small matter of the war which she couldn’t blame on Douglas but wanted to. Then her uncle, and losing Inveraray. Then her father and his stomach and the awfulness, then a Turk had put a bullet in Ivar.

She hadn’t meant to get married, that was the thing. She’d meant to have fun; she was only playing. But people love spilling secrets, don’t they? She’d spilled and Joan had spilled and Douglas had spilled too. That last year at Inveraray, the year of the clock, she’d called it – when her father was still alive and her brother too, when Douglas was forced to a show-down in the library and her mother’s gaze had settled into a stone frame from which it had not moved – Douglas had given her a clock to watch time passing. Their year apart was supposed to cool the waters, make them see sense – and it would have done too if his mother hadn’t got it into her head to announce their secret engagement in The Times. Everyone knew why. Enid was a catch. Douglas wasn’t.

And if war hadn’t been declared? What then? If the date of their reunion at the Eton & Harrow hadn’t fallen on the same day as the start of the war, and Douglas hadn’t been one of the first to sign up? Could she have wriggled out of it then? Their love was already over. She’d spent a year away from him, and, if it hadn’t been for the clock, well, she could have forgotten him entirely. He was a nobody, a nothing; she was meant for great things. She never wanted to marry. She’d already decided that she was destined to be a nun – a great sage of celibacy and wisdom, a constant communion with God, famous yet private. But war was declared, Douglas did sign up and her mother gave her the emerald engagement ring reluctantly, with a force that said you don’t deserve this but heritage dictates, and heritage always wins.