She joined the routine of Didlington, her name on the rota of jobs. Prepare breakfast on Mondays, wash up on Tuesdays, help with luncheon on Wednesdays. There was the prayer room to keep tidy, and charitable works pinned up on a board, where you could tick your name off if you’d made more than three visits in a week. Dairy duty and butter-making, laundry and ironing – she never knew sheets were so large. There were servants, but only a few of them – boys covered in coal dust and girls who swept the floors, an ancient nanny who lived in the attic bereft of charges, and a footman who’d found new cause in operating betting at race meets. Ruby’s mother commanded the running of things: the butcher’s list and the vegetable plot, the fruit cages and hens. Ruby skipped about gathering volunteers for fund raising, and encouraged anyone lagging to join her on energising walks.

Some sort of rhythm began, of washing and dressing and going downstairs to prayer meetings, and meals, and charitable works. Chores done, Enid spent hours in the library, a book dropped on her chest when the effort to read became too much. The animal heads, as she lay on the sofa, seemed to stare at her as if they would eat her, or eat her brain. They seemed to say come here, we will rid you of this terrible thing called life, we will release you, if you give in, and she did give in, to some sort of rhythm, the new normality of washing and chores, of prayer meetings and visiting the sick, of Ruby’s insistent smile – and she would have given in more, if only she could feel her body.

She knew she had one – she could see it as she moved about; she saw her hands and feet, her chest with a book dropped on it, but these were the only signs, and she wondered, often, if she existed at all. Of course she did – there were her hands and feet doing chores and visiting the poor, there was Ruby smiling, and a visiting minister booming in her ears, there was the wide open sky of Norfolk, and the Palladian mansion of brick and prayer, but where was she? She was with the drip-drip memory inside, of everything brought with her.