When they arrived home, grimy and tired, full of poor railway meals and hungry for sleep and stillness, Fagus was carried to bed while she sat by the fire and thought and thought, chasing the tail of some feeling that escaped her but left a trail of arrows vaguely scattered yet pointing at something, something she couldn’t see. There are no accidents, you brought me to this. She thought it again and again until another memory surfaced as she put the guard up on the fire, that of watching Douglas’ soft, embarrassed face as he said, marry me, and her thinking: mother will be furious. She crouched, stilled by it, her hands forgotten on the guard as realisation seeped from her centre into her veins until her body shook and the arrows swung into magnetic place across a map perfectly laid out in her brain. There it was, from flippant act to crippled son, via the deaths of the men she’d loved.

The house quiet, the children in bed, Douglas in the bath, she went to the bookshelves and ran the tips of her fingers along the spines until they stopped between the Bible and Gardens of England. Science and Health, by Mary Baker Eddy. She pulled it out and sat by the dying embers to read again of how there were no accidents, how the sins of the mother may be visited on the innocent child, how prayer was the maxim to pain. The pages were smudged where their hands had held them before.

It took a while to pluck up the courage. Perhaps even then she wouldn’t have done it if Douglas hadn’t knocked on her door one night, a week after they’d got back. He always knocked, even though it was their room. Since they’d arrived back from Scotland he’d slept in his dressing room, but tonight she’d made a special effort to be nice. She’d got Everett to make Coq au Vin, a dish she despised and took Everett all day, but Douglas loved it. It always prompted him to tell the story of eating it in Paris.

“How those chaps made it, I don’t know.”

He’d got to the bit about replacing mushrooms with corn flour faggots.

“They must have pulled out all the stops,” she said, smiling.

“I should think we were the last ones to have it.”