There was a back gate, and Mr Parish located it. As Kitten ducked through, I saw his hand dive to the back of her skirt and she squealed again and smacked him and laughed and said, ‘Oh no, you don’t!’ and then they were gone—a faint titter and screech in the air outside that could’ve been anybody.

I rolled back and forth on my trike over the uneven bricks and wondered about this, Ornella, and if it was somehow connected to Mother and Papa, and to you and Carlito, though not to Rosa, and not, strangely, to Mrs Parish. I didn’t understand why someone playful and young who always had Minties in her handbag would want to eat a steak dinner with someone old and boring like Mr Parish.

‘He’s famous,’ you said to me once, scoffing, like being famous was a stupid thing to be. ‘He can do whatever he likes.’

10 JULY 1966

Dear Tilde,

Oh Tilde, Owen is in the hospital. You won’t believe what happened.

Sunday night, I made soup to take next door to my elderly neighbour. I had just taken the soup off the stove and was carrying it in my big blue pot. I’d made an apple pie too, and Owen was carrying that on a plate. Well, we set out all right, but Owen stumbled and dropped his pie and so I put the soup-pot down on the ground to help him. But the pot went down on something not flat, on stones or rubble or something, and it tipped—so fast, Tilde!—and the hot soup went all over Owen’s legs. I rushed him straight to the garden tap and ran cold water on his legs. And then I made a cold bath and held him in it for a whole half-hour—you have no idea how hard it was to keep my nerve, he just screamed and screamed. I’m not even sure how I knew to keep him in the water that long, but they said at the hospital it was the best thing I could have done. Thank god! But oh Tilde, he is wrapped from knee to ankle in bandages, and they had to give him morphine to get him to sleep.

I am utterly wretched. What sort of a mother am I? I should give him up entirely to the Parishes.

He is in the hospital by himself for at least the next two nights. And when I go in, he doesn’t even want me. It’s like he knows that I’m a failure, Tilde. And perhaps it is my fault, because I’d had a drink, I’d had a couple of sherries, before I got the pot off the stove, you know.

Send me something, darling Tilde, to make me feel better.

Veda x

† † †

21 JULY 1966

Dear Tilde,

Thank you so much for your telegram.

Owen is now home, tottering around quite happily. They’ve assured me at the Children’s that the burns are mild and will not scar because of my ‘quick-thinking’ with the cold water, but that is not sufficient to ease my conscience.