“Last step,” said Mandy, her other hand cupped under Enid’s elbow.

If Joan had loved her. If it hadn’t been a fight.

“There we are.”

If she and Joan had been friends. If they’d been close. If they could have gone through it together.

“Now where would you like to sit?”

Why had her sister hated her? What had she done? Enid thought back through the years of their childhood; of funny, dumpy Joan in the castle, always dropping things, always getting in the way and saying the wrong thing at dinner. Clumsy, dumpy Joan who’d grown up, cut her hair and refused to marry, who’d said “men are dead,” and been allowed to get away with it. What had Enid ever done to harm her? But while Enid had conformed, Joan had tripped up and landed on the pulse. Men were dead, millions of them, and she’d found freedom.

She’d had their mother’s love. That was the root of it, wasn’t it? She’d had Sybil’s love as a panacea to not having the same from their father. Of course their father had loved her – he’d loved everyone, so had their brother – but he hadn’t shown it like he’d shown it to Enid. Was it Enid’s fault that he’d sought out her company more? When it mattered, Joan hadn’t lost her defender like Enid had – their father was dead, but their mother was at Joan’s side – Enid had had no one. She and her father were alike, it hadn’t been her fault, it was no one’s design but God’s.

“Why don’t you sit by the window?” said Mandy.

From slipping away with her father to talk about God on the shores of Loch Fyne, to a Christian Science nursing home in Hampstead. It was on another shore, the lake in Italy where she’d sneaked away with Douglas, that she’d first met the religion that would break them up and bring her here.