‘Tell us what you’re going to play, Olivia,’ Daddy prompted me.

I looked up. They were all smiling. Lipstick lips, moustaches, rows of teeth. I knew I looked sweet and pretty and small. I was too short to reach the pedals.

‘M-Mozart,’ I said. The stammer was deliberate of course.

I chose something easy and rattled it off, badly. Three sonatas played perfunctorily. I kept my face down, my heart pounding. The music did nothing for me. I wasn’t lost in it. I was outside it and hating those people. Hating them all.

Of course they all clapped. They had to. I boiled inside. Clapping something bad. Hypocrites.

‘Bravo!’ a voice boomed.

‘What a lovely child.’

‘Credit to you, Alec!’

My feet took me across the cream Persian rug and out of there, running up the stairs to my room and my sleeping birds. Kate followed me. Moments later I was sobbing, held in her round, comforting arms.

Chapter 3

Devon, July 1935

‘Livy? I love you.’

‘You shouldn’t say that.’ Olivia sat up abruptly in her bed across the room. ‘Girls aren’t supposed to love girls. Not like that.’

‘Not like anything,’ I protested. ‘Why d’you have to twist things? I just love you. You’re my best friend.’

Olivia relented and rolled sleepily across the bed again, grinning through strands of hair. ‘Funny old thing. I love you too.’

I lay back on the firm pillow. I was so happy. On holiday with the Kemps – in a hotel! I stretched and wiggled my toes, the dry grains of sand scratchy between them. The cotton sheet felt delicious against my bare legs. I couldn’t see anything clearly because my specs lay on the chair next to the bed. The light in the room was a blurry green, filtered through curtains which wafted by the open window, through which we could hear the waves.

Our first full day there and everything about it felt right. The sun was shining and only tiny puffs of cloud shifted slowly across the sky. We had swum and climbed on the rocks all morning while Elizabeth Kemp lay back in a chair on the sand and Alec had taken a boat out. We were now resting to let our lunch go down before swimming again. And the best thing of all was that we’d talked and laughed together all the morning, just her and me as close as close.

Before lunch we walked up the steep path from the beach to the cliff top, our legs scratched by gorse as we climbed the path of compacted mud, small stones rattling away from our pumps. We found a place to sit on the wiry grass which topped the headland, and looked out over the hazy blue of the estuary, tiny white sails in the distance.

Olivia sat leaning back on her hands, her legs stretched out in front, the warm wind blowing her hair back from her face.

‘I found a piano in that back sitting room in the hotel,’ she said. ‘So we shan’t have to do without playing after all.’