She walked next door to the small bedroom that Eva had told her was hers for the week. She sniffed the pillows, and the duvet. Yuk. When she was pregnant, everything smelt disgusting. Ancient bedding such as this seemed to reveal its ancestry; all the skin shed by the men and women who had used it, stretching back to Edwardian times, probably; Victorian times, maybe. How old did pillows get, in houses like this? She felt a wave of nausea; the bile rising in her throat.

A door opened at the other end of the passage. A mellifluosity of voices after the silence: the house wasn’t empty after all. I’ll show you where it is, said a girl’s voice, Eva’s granddaughter Zoe; and after her came the young Pakistani woman; and then a nun in one of those strange green habits which they wore in the islands. They failed to notice Alice – the passage was dark at that time of the afternoon – and, instead of going her way, turned as one, a murmuration, to descend the stairs. Alice heard them swooshing through the dining room below.

A text came in on Alice’s phone from the childminder in London. Her heart gave a lurch but it was nothing, only a question about chocolate, was her daughter allowed it, as she claimed? No, she texted back. Then, Yes, OK. She turned her phone off and went downstairs to the empty kitchen. She would make them tea.

She had it ready for them when they came through, a swoop of birds. She’d enjoyed listening to them as they blew through the house, only the emotion in their voices reaching her ears through the intervening layers of stone and wood and mortar. She imagined them picking things up, pointing things out, not really commenting on the house itself but on themselves: their own relationships, through it, to each other. And when they entered the kitchen at last, it was like gannets, in a burst of noisy chatter. Alice greeted the Pakistani girl, a Sheedi, and said something to her in Urdu; shook hands, formally, with Zoe; kissed the tall nun (Slavic cheeks with bones so high that they hurt when you kiss them, just as Eva writes somewhere in her book). Happy; they all seemed happy.

The happy sense lasted all evening. When Eva got home from college, Alice felt it in the air again, undeniable. Happiness had blown in from afar and taken roost in Harcourt House. She could sense the displacement of the air as the happiness beat its wings, the sonorous invisible cooing as it made itself at home there.

JUDGE: Your daughter, Zoe, was happy with Eva?

NINA: Yes. Now that she is gone I can see it. Eva was a good grandmother to Zoe in general.

JUDGE: It was only that one issue with which you had a problem?