The house felt peaceful. Partly, no doubt, because it was in a quiet street and had no party wall on one side; also, perhaps, because it was a place where troubled people came to find some peace by talking to one or other of her parents; but mostly, from her perspective, because it was a perfect family house. Ever since she could remember anything, she could remember being there, and when her parents died, she would no longer be there, since neither she nor Charlie could keep it. It was a family house for the precise family that the four of them constituted, giving it a complete continuity and a realistic impermanence. It had neither the financial nor the sentimental burdens of being ancestral, nor the restlessness of being part of an ascent or a separation or a decline. It had the additional stability of hardly ever changing. Until something definitively broke, neither Martin nor Lizzie could ever quite face having things done up. It was a place for work and hospitality, but mostly it was a home for the family she had almost been born into – making Olivia suspect that she was even more attached to it than any of the others.