“Dawn’s doing it. Didn’t you hear her? She was dialling the number. She’ll be trying now,” said Mandy, her voice losing the patient lilt that marked her out as a nurse.

“You can’t just try,” said Enid. She’d always hated the word. “You have to do. You have to do it, do you hear?”

But Mandy wasn’t a servant; she wasn’t Everett or a lady’s maid or a scullery girl. She was a nurse with two stars and a moon on her cheek, and she could do whatever she liked. “You sit tight,” she said, patting Enid’s hand quickly as she removed the claw nail hooked into her sleeve.

The woman on the television said, “Now don’t be afraid to add plenty of salt—” Enid closed her eyes.

That summer, that awful summer, when the whole awful mess began – she saw it before her, she saw it swimming towards her in images pocked with fright and exclusion – the loneliness of the nursery, the doctors streaming in and streaming away, the fights with Douglas, her mother’s face growing still, and conversations petering out every time she walked in the room.

She couldn’t have spent a month up there. Enid opened her eyes; the woman on the television was recommending half-fat cream. She closed them again. It had felt like it but she couldn’t have. She must have washed and peed and gone outside, but she couldn’t remember doing any of those things. Once Nanny Murrel had bought Finetta up to see her, but she’d waived them away. Finetta’s baby plumpness, her wriggling joy at life, were too much. Joan came up at the beginning, offering to sit with him. That hadn’t lasted either. And Douglas had come up a few times, determined to get him up, as though by the sheer force of his desire he’d rouse his son from this fairy-tale slumber and see him run on the lawns again. A few times he’d hauled him to sitting, but Fagus had toppled like a teddy bear. All he did was sleep.

She remembered the bed pans, and trying to rouse him for a wash. She remembered spooning broth into his mouth and it dribbling down his chin, soaking the newly changed sheets. She remembered how quiet he was, and the day he opened his eyes and said, I can’t see.