Days before the wedding, their mothers had shouted at each other in the drawing room of Bryanston Square while London clattered outside and Enid sat on the stairs, listening. Her allowance was agreed, an income and a house that turned out to be a villa in Berkshire, but the row saw in a cold and empty church. She was shoved into her mother’s wedding gown, the emerald ring on her finger, and Douglas, already in uniform, never lost the look of a man being carried hopelessly downstream. He’d gone off to war, France, not Gallipoli, and she’d wished it had been he – rather than Ivar – who’d never come home.

She wanted to lie down on the warm grass, but Fagus didn’t like lying down anywhere. He wanted to run, anywhere, everywhere. They’d arrived three days ago, and she was already exhausted. At least at home the garden was small, and she had Everett to look after him. Parenting was consistently shocking. No one had told her. As usual, she’d simply been given orders.

“Ours is a substantial fortune.” That’s what her mother had said the day the telegram arrived with news of her brother’s death. Even then she hadn’t realised that it was all her mother’s money, to do with as she liked, tied to no one, under no law but her own. She’d sat in the darkened quiet of the drawing room of Bryanston Square, shuttered and mute, Joan beside her on the settee, and wondered silently if the day of the telegram was the day to discuss it, but their mother had marched her words relentlessly over their grief, the brown paper wedged beneath her knuckles. “Ours is a substantial fortune. You,” and she’d pointed at Enid, “must replace him.” As if that were possible. She’d had no intention of replacing anybody.

She dropped Bleak House on the grass and swapped Fagus to her other side. He’d tired that arm from pulling. His sweet round face, his crystal blue eyes – from the moment he’d torn his way out, she’d loved him, and she’d known too, as his squirming wet body was lain on hers and her heart cracked open, that the love was impossible – a handshake with the devil that would break her. Nothing good could come of such a force. It was too much. She could never un-love him – even if he died he would never cease to exist to her – and she felt now as she’d felt for the last four exhausting years of his life that she’d known all this before he was conceived.