‘You’re lucky, then. I find the idea pretty horrific, to be perfectly honest. Awful, puking things, aren’t they? I can understand women who have abortions. It’s a horrible business, but there must be times when it seems vastly preferable to the alternative.’

Fry was conscious of Maggie’s gentle probing. It was well done, the sign of a skilful interviewer. The fact that Fry had allowed herself to be interviewed had encouraged Maggie, of course. At this point, she either went along with the game and told Maggie what she wanted to know, or she closed it down and risked losing the fragile intimacy she had built up.

‘I had an abortion once,’ she said.

Maggie’s voice dropped a shade, sliding a sympathetic note into her next words.

‘They tell me you always wonder what the baby would have been like, what sex it was. You think about what name you would have given it, if it had been allowed to live. Even an abortion doesn’t mean a clean ending, it seems to me.’

‘Yes, you’re right.’

A small silence developed between them. Fry held on to it, valuing the suggestion of understanding. At the same time, she was calculating how she could use it. The time was almost right.

‘But there’s more, isn’t there?’ said Maggie quietly. ‘Something else that you can’t forget.’

‘Yes,’ said Fry. ‘There is.’ She told herself it was for the best. She could work it out of her system later.

Maggie seemed to decide not to push for details.

‘Sometimes there are things you need to remember, no matter how much it hurts,’ she said.

‘A necessary pain?’

‘Maybe. But that necessary pain . . . does it always have to be a pain that you inflict on yourself? Because that sort of pain hurts all the more, don’t you find?’

Fry put her finger on the ‘play’ and ‘record’ buttons, and looked at Maggie.

‘Shall we try again?’

Maggie closed her eyes. The tapes whirred quietly.

‘Think about when you reached Ringham . . .’

Maggie breathed quietly. ‘I remember the leaves under my feet,’ she said. ‘There were deep piles of them. They crunched when I trod in them. Thousands of dead leaves. I kicked some of them up in the air, like I used to do when I was child. A great heap of them, all brown and gold.’

Fry thought she had stopped there. She waited for a moment, listening to the click of the tape decks. She had just opened her mouth to nudge Maggie with a question, when she began again.