Joan. Joan was the problem. Joan whom she’d spent her childhood laughing at. Whom she’d never taken care of when she’d seen her sat alone at a dance or lost for words at dinner. Whom she’d teased out riding, when Joan’s horse was the only one who hadn’t been able to fit through a gate, or at tennis when Joan’s serve went backwards. She pushed a strand of hair from her face. But where had Joan been when their mother put her down? Where had she stood when Sybil had said for the hundredth time that Enid should be more like her sister and stop showing off? Next to Sybil, that’s where, with a smug look of completion on her face, as if every guttural, oh that escaped their mother’s mouth, every lowering of the lids and rounding of the lips into that one, dismissive syllable had been designed to make Joan feel better. It wasn’t Enid’s fault she was younger and more beautiful. It wasn’t her fault that their father had loved her more. She’d just come along at the end, the youngest born into a mould already set, yet Sybil took it as intentional, as if Enid governed all of them and deserved the consequences. She’d never said a single nice thing to her. Not once had she said, well done, or you look lovely. Just a turn of the head, a flick of the eyes, and a rush to love Joan.

She’d spent her whole childhood failing to catch her mother’s attention. She’d tried and tried until one day, probably the day she’d met Douglas, she’d stopped. Why leap when her mother’s gaze was always an inch above her head? She’d married Douglas. Doing something terrible had forced that indomitable gaze to seek her out. Now she couldn’t escape it and they were going to punish her. This was it.

She peered through the darkening light and willow branches to the house. Someone was lying on a lounger, smoking. When she got closer, she saw it was Douglas.

His soft face was crowded with pain. He looked up for a moment, rested his head again and blew a long line of smoke into the dusk. When she reached him he said, “I should just get a train now. I should bundle him up, and get a train, and never come back.”

Enid stopped at the edge of the stone, a few feet from him. “Keep your voice down.”

“Don’t you tell me to do anything. That’s all I’ve had from the moment I met your family: orders from you, orders from your mother. Where are my minions? Who do I get to order about?”

“She’s going to cut him off.”