‘Run upstairs, Zoe,’ Eva said, cutting across Nina’s high-pitched monologue about the danger the child’s life had been in, as well as the insufferable conceit of Sebastian and his brothers.

‘Don’t you tell my daughter what to do,’ Nina shouted but Zoe had already fled up the front stairs, to the landing outside her grandmother’s bedroom, up the next flight, to the attic room where Mariam now lived.

Zoe lay on the bed in Mariam’s room and put her fingers in her ears. Even from there she could feel the tremor of her mother’s shouting. The words were indistinguishable but she sensed the disruption: to the stones of the house which shuddered in distaste, to the trembling glass of the windows, to the wood pigeons whose call from the branches of the oak tree outside was usually so soothing – even they seemed agitated this evening. She could detect the anxious scurrying of woodlice beneath the floorboards, the fluttering of moths behind the curtains and in the cupboards. She felt the thud of her own heart and the sound of her mother’s anger vibrating through her to her. Even worse than the image of her was her tone of voice, which Zoe knew Stella would say was drawn from the soap operas her mother watched every night on television, and the tabloids she read during her tea breaks at work. And yet in everything her mother spoke there was a subsidiary sound, an undercurrent of something authentically Ninaesque. Zoe hated the house for disdaining her. Nobody should disdain Nina, not Eva, not Stella.

NINA: All that shouting. Didn’t achieve anything. Just made me feel stupid. And Eva felt bad, I could see that. Kept apologising. Saying, Nina, I just want us to be friends. All right, Eva, I said. Let’s just leave it, OK? And all the while those women of Eva’s, looking on. They didn’t like me. Looked down on me.

JUDGE: Did you like them?

NINA: I didn’t interfere in their lives, did I? It was them who interfered in mine.

JUDGE: Then what happened?

NINA: I left, angry as anything, in my car before I could get even madder by being lectured to by Eva. Forgot all about Zoe—

JUDGE: Was she lecturing you?

NINA: If she was, I was too hopping mad to listen. So, I was driving back past the church when I see her come out of the churchyard gate. She fainted, like right there, on the path. I screeched to a halt.

JUDGE: Who fainted?

NINA: Mariam. You know, the black woman. The Pakistani girl. The Muslim.

Little lentil, Mariam whispered. She begged her little lentil not to leave her. Her little lentil was ten weeks old inside her. Dark red blood clots.

NINA: Seems like none of them knew she was pregnant. If Eva knew, she kept it from the rest of them.