But I couldn’t resist telling you my happy memories. When you were young and fierce with affection for your friends it made me think of her so often and how we were together. We did have those good, happy times, Anna. I shouldn’t want you to think I had invented those. I always wanted you to know about Olivia as I knew her then, because I have loved very few people as I loved Livy.

I’ve tried to be frank with you about all aspects of my life. I’ve always admired your straightness and I know this is what you would want. Some of it you’ll already know, but there’s much that you don’t. I seem to have ended up telling you my life story – but then there’s not much from that period of my life which is not somehow bound up with Olivia.

I hoped to tell you all this at some point. I didn’t, though, expect you to hear any of it from Olivia herself. But in 1976 Alec Kemp died, and not long after that she began writing to me. They had gone very quiet, the Kemps. He stayed on the Council for a time, but he certainly never made it as an MP. I don’t recall him ever standing for Parliament again – a fact which has somehow made it easier for me to forgive him. What relations were like between Olivia and her parents all those years, I’ve no idea. But the letters started coming. She begged me to see her. She sent me bits and pieces which she must have written in London after she left Arden Mental Hospital. Some of these were rather disconnected, but the ones I have included for you speak clearly. They tell of things I barely guessed at the time: the hidden side of her life at home of which I felt the vibrations, but for many years knew nothing of the causes. Her father’s death must have prompted her to reach back into the past and try to explain it. These fragments are, though, I have to add, stamped with Olivia’s hallmark: a complete lack of remorse for her actions.

I didn’t respond. Even now I couldn’t bear to see her.

I hope, Anna, that I have also given you enough of a sense of who your father was. Even had things been different, I don’t think we would have lasted in the end. He wanted to keep me like a cupboard full of starched white napkins and bring one out now and then to wipe his face on. Your generation would put up with that even less well than I did.

I’m sorry I couldn’t just tell you this face to face, but it goes too deep, and I find I am more like my own mother in some ways than I’ve always hoped. I’m even glad you won’t be able to question me about it. I know how ill I am, whatever they say to humour me, and that my life now measures in weeks.