She’d thought she was saving herself but the sacrifice had been all hers. She’d provided He who would provide for all, as if all males could be relied upon to be fair, while Joan had stayed free to waft amongst her famous friends and help no one, sacrifice nothing; she’d lunch with Virginia Woolf, drink cocktails with Maynard Keynes, gossip with Katherine Mansfield. When Enid failed to catch her name in the society pages, their mother would fill the gap with, Joan is marvellous. Do you know she – and there would follow some long tirade about how terrific she was at running the house or having parties, how fascinating her friends were and so kind to include her in their evenings. If she wasn’t sheltering from sandstorms in Egypt or playing blackjack in Monte Carlo, Joan was putting her feet up in Bryanston Square. She talked about getting a flat of her own, sharing with Pat, but why bother? Their mother’s London house suited her too well. She had the life Enid could have had. Except Enid wouldn’t have spent her liberty pouring cocktails down her throat. She’d have given up her worldly goods and devoted herself to God, or at least poetry, or at least something other than gin.

Fagus stood on her feet and leaned against her legs. “Why have we stopped, Mamma?”

She pushed his fringe out of his eyes. “I’m just resting.” She did still believe in God, even after the war was over. She didn’t have any other friends.

Fagus jumped off and ran towards the rose garden, with its steps and bricks and deep water, its every opportunity for damage. She called after him, “No, Fagus. Stay on the grass.” Joan and Pat looked up briefly and she felt their judgement drifting like their smoke and laughter through the warm air, to see her launching after her little boy, who at four years old should have been steady, but they hadn’t been there to hear the trip, smash, cry of another black eye. They didn’t know it wasn’t worth it.

His body was a battleground of scars. Douglas said she coddled him, but Douglas didn’t know. He just whistled off to London every morning to play at the railway business in an office while she stared down the days and pretended she liked her son in hats. The worst had been at Epsom. Why had her mother been so insistent that she show him off? He wasn’t a toy. He was hers, her boy, her precious boy, the only good thing to come out of bloody Berkshire. Her mother had insisted. “Slopping about as if you were at sea. Hiding him away,” she’d scolded. “He won’t know what the world looks like.”