Cass still used the bedroom which had been hers in childhood, and Georgie too slept in her old room when she visited. Celia and Nick’s felt very different from how it had when both their parents were alive. The accoutrements of decrepitude – a walking frame, a clunky invalid’s tray, the plastic commode – gave it the impersonal atmosphere of a care home. It was a lovely room, with windows on two sides, the only one in the house to have been wallpapered. The blue Chinese paper had faded in places but was still grand, with its pattern of twisting branches and elaborate, long-tailed birds. The bureau that Celia had inherited from her mother was still in place, dotted with envelopes and papers and silver-topped pin boxes. Celia had used it as her dressing table and to write letters at: it had always been covered with bits and pieces. As children the girls had loved being allowed to open the little drawers with their tiny ivory knobs. Each was lined with brown velvet, spotted with age. Here was treasure: Celia’s jewellery, antique letters tied with ancient ribbon, a contemporary photograph of Alfred, Lord Tennyson. They weren’t supposed to look in these drawers unless their mother was close by, hovering. Their contents were the only things in the house that she guarded.

‘Do you want to go through Mummy’s desk with me, later?’ Cass had asked Georgie. ‘It’s all pretty good rubbish, I should think.’

‘God, yes! You never know what we might stumble across in there.’

‘I took most of the jewellery out when she was ill. After Adam found her trying to hide Granny’s diamond bracelet in the loo cistern.’

‘I didn’t know Granny had had a diamond bracelet. Mum never wore it, did she? What’s it like?’

‘Not as nice as it sounds, actually. I’ll show you.’

‘What happened to that locket, the one with the human hair in it? Do you remember? It always gave me a sort of thrill, a bit, to think that the hair must’ve belonged to someone who was dead.’

‘You were always quite morbid. Do you remember, we used to do elaborate funerals for dead birds and stuff?’

‘Yes, and I always wanted to be the vicar. And we tried to mummify a pigeon once.’

‘I’d forgotten that! I suppose the person whose hair it was was dead when the locket was made. I mean, it’s mourning jewellery, isn’t it? That’s why it’s got the little edging of black enamel and the forget-me-not on the front. It’s in the box with the other stuff.’

‘Weird. I wonder who the dead person was?’

‘Some ancestor. Take your pick,’ said Cass.

‘Maybe it was from a child who died at birth. Maybe their mother wore it, to remember her baby by,’ said Georgie. As soon as the words came out of her mouth she wished she could unsay them.