Revisiting herself at these young stages she tried to relearn her mother, playing through their lives together year by year like tracks on a record.

After seeing Roland she felt spurred to make a start on the house.

Clearing Kate’s wardrobe and dressing table was the worst part. All those intimately shaped garments. The one bottle of cologne, sparing amounts of powder and scantly filled jewellery box. She found a pair of clip-on earrings, fifties style, round and white, dotted with tiny pink spots. She had seen them in the shallow wooden box all her life, yet now they looked so foreign, belonging to a stranger.

She worked in as detached a way as she could, a caul of practical concentration wrapped tight round her. But sometimes it slipped, or something penetrated it, and she sat and cried among this residue of Kate’s life.

There were no diaries. Apart from Kate’s last effort to explain herself to Anna she had not been a writer by habit. She was not an introspective woman. Too busy out there getting on with it. Nor were there a great number of books. She did find several volumes of poetry though, arranged incongruously in with Kate’s few crime novels and old copies of Reader’s Digest. They were old books, their pages almost orange at the edges and smelling musty.

‘With all my love, now and always’, was written on the first page of one in small, looped handwriting. ‘Angus’. It was dated 1940.

The past seemed to swoop, swallow-like, through the house those two weeks. Though she was confronted at every turn by the things which had made up Kate’s life, it was Olivia’s voice which kept coming to her. She imagined it soft, sweet, always edged with tears: ‘By the morning I know him. I want my life to be his. And they take him away . . .’

Anna thought of that loss. Unbearable. She knew she could not let this rest. Soon, when she was ready, she would have to try and see Olivia. And after all, why would Kate have left the letters, made her explanation as she did, if she had not been deputing Anna to face Olivia for her?

The only person she could stand to be with was Roland.

The first time he called round with the opening greeting, ‘I thought you might like a bit of help.’ Then added quickly, ‘Or company?’

She opened the door in an old pair of mauve dungarees, hair standing on end from bed, and was about to say no, she could manage, but then saw Roland had come out of his own need. She saw his emotion, coming back into Kate’s house again, eyeing the bin liners stacked for Oxfam in the front room in the grey light of net curtains and looking round as if memorizing the place. He took out a handkerchief and wiped perspiration from his pink forehead, talking a little too fast, trying to cover his wretchedness. She remembered how his face registered every crease and tuck of emotion. His lips twitched as they walked into the kitchen. It was the room she was leaving until last and it still felt as if her mother might walk in any moment, put on the plastic Colman’s Mustard apron and start bustling around in her brown brogue shoes.