A thin carpet curved up the attic stairs, the colour of green baize. But at the top the floor was bare for the maids, a peg rug or two in their rooms. I had new shoes: black patent leather, rounded toes, with a strap and a button to fasten them. I watched my feet as I ran up the stairs, my thin brown legs beneath a cherry-coloured skirt, white ankle socks, the shoes . . . They tap-tapped loudly on those wooden boards. I ran to Izzy’s door, rapped with my fingers, didn’t wait –

‘Izzy, look – I’ve got new shoes!’

It was his face. For seconds as I burst in on them, Daddy was in crisis, deep in his body’s pleasure. He curved back over Izzy’s little body, pushing down on his arms, her knees very white drawn up each side of him as she held him. His face was thrust back, red and sweating, mouthing the air, eyes squeezed shut.

Before he could recover himself enough even to speak my name I was downstairs in my room with my birds, bent up rigid on my bed with the eiderdown over my head. I was too sick even to cry. What they were doing I knew, and I didn’t know. He had showed me all his weakness.

‘Olivia?’

He’d pulled clothes over himself quickly and come down to sit on my bed. He was scared and I hated him for it. He lifted the eiderdown and laid his big hand on my back, but I curled myself tighter, squirming.

‘Princess? Come on – there’s no need to be upset. Izzy and I were just playing a little game and it’s all over now. It’s nothing to worry about. You can just forget it.’

His voice was light and wheedling. He tried to lift me on to his lap but he had a new sweaty smell and I pushed him away. But then I started to cry on my bed and I crawled back into his arms. He stroked my hair. His hand smelled of her.

‘We’ll let that be our little secret. Mummy needn’t know our secret, need she? Just you and me, my pretty angel. You’re good at keeping secrets, aren’t you?’

I nodded, sobbing into his chest. The birds shifted on their perches.

The next day he came to me holding a box tied with extravagant pink ribbons. ‘Angel – this is for you.’

The dress was also pink – taffeta, with silky bows sewn round the full skirt and lace petticoats.

By the end of the week, Izzy was gone.

* * *

Chapter 8

Birmingham, 1938

That terrible July evening.

The four of us were at the Kemps. We had lain in the sun most of the afternoon, drugged by the heat. The boys, shirts unbuttoned, sprawled side by side on a rug. William’s solid, sporty frame was tanned and muscular from a summer term of tennis, cricket and swimming, his broad chest covered by a down of fair hair. His face was freckled and rather bullish. He lay with his arm under his head, his wavy hair bleached on top by the sun, blue eyes moving over a book on the Renaissance. The pages were dwarfed by his large hands.