James was an old cat now. She had never much liked him, but her parents had been gently determined that she keep a pet. It was as if they were encouraging her, at the age of thirteen, to accept emotional ties of her own, to love something as much as they loved each other, to take her first steps on the path to becoming them. If she wasn’t quite as enthusiastic, Marnie had been willing enough: but James, proving standoffish, stubborn, obsessed even as a kitten, soon relieved her of the effort. She had envied him to start with, then, in a sense, forgotten him. If he had vanished now, it was just another absence in a history of absences. All of this – the cat quietly making a kingdom of its own in the long grass and thistles between the orchard and the river, then Tim dying, now Anna dying – made life seem so sinister for a moment that she sat unable to move. Up in the house the phone rang; but by the time she got there whoever it was had stopped trying. Rather than do nothing, she went through Anna’s messages. One was from a decorator whose quote for the bathroom seemed quite high, another the usual failed attempt to connect by an automated cold-calling service; a third was from Marnie herself, left late on the previous evening in a voice so tired she barely recognised it as her own:

‘Mum, I’ve got some news about my tests.’

The remaining calls, half a dozen of them, were from Anna’s psychiatrist. They sounded urgent. About to call her back, Marnie heard a noise in the kitchen, the cat nosing its food bowl about on the tiles.

‘James!’ she said. ‘Oh, James!’

Caught in the client’s naive but effective web of transference, counter-transference and projective identification – and more rattled than she was willing to admit by Anna’s defection – Helen Alpert had made the first of these calls on her way back from Walthamstow the previous evening.