‘I can’t talk about this any more,’ Camilla interrupted. ‘I’d like to spend time with you, Mother, but I don’t want to be dragged through all the details, and the guilt and blame and excuses. Whatever happened, however it happened, it’s all beyond us now. I can’t cope with replays of our messed-up lives. I won’t do it, and I don’t want to see him. If you can accept those provisos, I’ll stay here with you for as long as I can.’

Marina had been appalled by Camilla’s cold appraisal of the situation. It was tragic that she should perceive her parents’ lives in such a distorted framework. This was what they had done to her, she and George, and there was no one else to blame. There would be no reconciliation between father and daughter. Marina felt a tearing sensation in her heart. She would have to choose between them for the moment, to see them separately. Perhaps she would never see them together again. She thought of this as a punishment for the years of unhappiness she had caused, and she promised herself that she would not fail again in these last months of her life.

They had settled into a companionable routine in the country, sharing short walks, books and television, and the quiet of the small house. There were times when Marina was overcome by fatigue, when she was short of breath, bruised and aching. Then she spent part of her day in bed or sitting beside the fire, constantly cold although there was a woollen rug around her knees and the house was heated to the point of suffocation. She no longer wore any jewellery. Her fingers had become too thin for her rings, and her skin looked almost transparent. Camilla sometimes read to her until she fell asleep. Then she put on a jacket and boots and left the constraints of the house to walk through the fields, with the soft sprinkle of early-winter rain on her face and ice in her heart. She wondered how she would manage if Marina’s condition worsened, knowing that she would be obliged to telephone her father and ask him to come down. Guilt hovered over her because she had enforced a ban on George’s visits while she was at the cottage, and she never answered the telephone in case she had to speak to him. Each time she thought of him she remembered the horror on his face as he turned to look at her on that day of revelation, and she tried to obliterate from her memory the awful sight of the young man, naked on the bed. But she was not about to canonise her mother. Particularly when Winston Hayford telephoned to talk to Marina.

‘What’s happened to your admirer from Ghana?’ Camilla asked, later in the day.