‘I told you, didn’t I? How many more times?’ She repeated all the reasons in a superior voice. She wasn’t to have anything to do with someone whose mother was in the asylum, let alone anyone who played with Molly Fox. ‘My mother says I should keep away from both of you. We thought you were from a nice family – but you’re not.’

She turned, looking away so as not to see Em’s face again this time, and ran after the others. She could see the last of the children in the playground eavesdropping on what had happened. Some of them were making faces at each other. Nosy parkers! But as Katie was going in through the school door, she glanced back. Em was standing in the playground where she had left her, all alone, as if she was rooted to the spot.

Three

All Katie knew was that her mother had married for love, a man who was an Irishman and a Catholic, and because of this Vera O’Neill’s parents had cut her off like a diseased limb.

The one photograph of their wedding day – he dark, handsome, much taller than his stately bride with her old-fashioned hair and adoring smile – rested in its frame on the front mantelpiece.

When Katie thought about her father, she remembered a pair of well-polished black boots close to the brass fender by the fire, her sitting beside them, running a finger over the shiny surface and his voice, ‘Can you see your face in there then, Katie-Kitten?’

She could recall the sound of him more than a face – a gentle, lilting voice. There was an overall shape, the memory of black hair, hands with black hairs on the fingers and neat half-moons in the nails, of being held in strong arms, a smell of tobacco, that voice which held a smile in it.

No certain memory of his illness had stayed in her mind at all. Her mother said he had been ailing for months, starting with the coughing, then worse, and heartbreaking to watch. Katie had been so young they had kept it all from her somehow. But she did remember being taken up to see him in bed once or twice.

‘Why did Daddy pass away?’ she asked, several times over the years, trying to make sense of it all.

‘I told you, he was very poorly,’ Vera O’Neill would say, putting on a soft, sing-song voice when she spoke of this, almost as if it were a tragic fairytale. ‘He had a sickness in his lungs called tuberculosis. I nursed him for as long as I could. He suffered so much, my poor darling Michael, and he went into the hospital at the end. I felt I’d failed him, but it had to be. That’s why you don’t remember.’