Serena brings a tray with frothy ice cream for herself and Lydia. And iced ginger ale. The glasses, the ice cream bowls, all repose on a kingfisher-blue woven tray cloth. Woven on the dryad loom. The ice cream tastes of egg. There are no artificial flavours to titillate the tongue.

‘Come, let us look at the room,’ Serena opens the door of her mother’s bedroom.

‘Holy of Holies,’ says Lydia.

The emptiness and silence of a room bereft of its spirit. The furniture is painted white. With wreaths of flowers and garlands. Nuptial chamber. A place for nymphs to disport themselves in.

‘All this furniture belonged to Beatrice long ago. Then my mother inherited it all after her death.’

A single bed against the wall. Solitary. Separate. Covered with a worn blue blanket. Serena’s mother lay beneath it often, in the later stages of her life, in great agony. She had cancer. The cancer must have started a long time ago, eating into her slowly. The cancer of her regret. On her mirrored dressing table an old box of Coty’s face powder gathers dust. A bottle of Oil of Olay. Tiny perfume bottles. Flower fragrances. Nothing luxurious. Little vanities. There is a wide, locked wardrobe with all her clothes.

‘She looked after her things carefully,’ remarks Serena.

On the clothes-horse folded garments neatly hang over the rails. Just as if she had carefully kept them for another day, to be worn again. It is several months now since she died.

‘She died on the 23rd of October. Three months later, one night, I heard the sound of bitter weeping. Such bitter weeping. It came from her room. After her death my husband went through her handbag and tossed out her diary. It was a record of her intense suffering.’

Serena takes up another of her uncle’s sermons and together she and Lydia turn the pages … ‘Then there are others who are afraid of death because they do not know what lies beyond it. And also because they haven’t won forgiveness for all the wrong they have done in their lives and are afraid to face God because they fear judgement …’

The rage of a sea of passion stilled, frozen. To whom could the mother cry out? It had begun, this death of the soul, many years before. Those disappointed hopes of a son who was slowly digging their grave. Who could say why or how?

John’s body became his own area of exploration. The cicatrices of pain in his mind. And after all that naked brutality, this … to become a vegetable; to be bathed, dressed, fed, taken out. In someone else’s power. The dominance never ceased. He could not call his soul his own. There grew a bond between the two victims. Mother and son. The two sufferers. The father took to his bed. His protest against a wilful and dominant wife. He retreated into silence.