The girl must have heard the car but she took no notice and that added to Molly’s sense of unreality. Like a character in a children’s fantasy she felt she had gone-back in time and helpless and unseen was watching history run before her. The girl walked with the baby into the house.

Molly parked the car and walked across the lawn into a large porch with wooden seats on each side and two pairs of wellingtons on the stone floor. The girl had gone on into the house, but Molly waited in the porch and looked for a doorbell. Through the open inner door she heard:

‘It’s no good, Mother. I don’t think I can go through with this.’

Someone, surely Alex, said: ‘Nonsense, darling. Don’t be so melodramatic!’

Molly gave up her search for the doorbell and banged hard on the glass of the porch. Alex appeared in the hall from a room at the back of the house. Even in middle age she was a striking woman, tall and well proportioned. Her hair was still long, plaited and pinned to her head.

‘Yes?’ she said. Then there must have been some trace of recognition. ‘I’m sorry…’

‘It’s Molly, Molly Palmer-Jones. My aunt, Ursula Ottway, was a friend of Miss Prime’s.’

‘That’s right!’ Alex said. ‘I remember now. You used to come with Ursula to visit her.’

‘I don’t want to disturb you …’ Molly said, but she walked from the porch into the hall. ‘My husband and I are staying at Back Rigg for a few days and I thought I’d just take the chance … I wondered if you’d heard that Ursula was dead.’

‘No,’ Alex said. ‘I didn’t know. I see Simon and Joanna quite regularly but recently we’ve not been in touch …’ She paused. ‘ I’m so sorry,’ she said. ‘I liked Ursula very much. She and Kath were such friends. I hadn’t realised she was ill.’

There was a silence. Perhaps she expected that, having passed on the news, Molly would leave, but she made no move to go.

‘Come on into the kitchen,’ Alex said at last. ‘ My daughter’s here with the baby. I was going to make coffee.’

It was clear that Monk’s Wood was no longer in communal occupation. Alex had stamped her style on the place and there was a peace and an order which would have been impossible if it were still shared by assorted strangers. The girl from the garden was standing by the window. She had unusually flat features, which gave her face the look of a rag doll.

‘This is Rowan,’ Alex said. ‘And William, my grandson. He’s nine months old but Rowan doesn’t trust me to look after him while she’s working away.’