Her fingers played over a ring on her left hand; an emerald set amongst diamonds on a band of deep gold. Ageless and prominent as if washed up on driftwood, the jewels glinted above skin that had lost its fat and become the colour of mud-spattered sand. Once upon a time, even after Joan had got the knives out, Enid was young and beautiful; always more beautiful and younger than Joan, and perhaps that was the shallowest of causes. Just that. She even had a portrait by Augustus John to prove it – her head half-turned, her hand in mid gesture as if she were saying something. She had been, though she couldn’t remember what. It had moved with her, from one corridor wall to another and finally to here, a bedside cupboard in Hawthorne Christian Science House.

She pushed her thumbs against the top bones of her eye sockets, making her forehead ache. She wished she could stop thinking of her. Like the television downstairs that fired pictures of American soldiers into the shabby lounge of the nursing home, Joan transformed a tired plain into a place of war. The anger that slept and the grief that haunted woke up and shouted, the hurt showed itself undimmed and Enid’s thoughts became furies, a battlefield overrun with blood and trenches. On days like these it was impossible to traverse from one side of her mind to the other without falling in a hole, tripping on a jagged bone or snagging her skirts on barbed wire; her very own Vietnam or Gallipoli, alive with a carnage she couldn’t stop.

There was a knock on her door.

“Enid?” It was Carol, one of the nurses. Fat Carol with the piggy eyes, come to brush her hair and clean her up, ready for her weekly visit from Finetta.