Anna thought  that was such a good idea. ‘Perhaps you could help me get these bags of things down to the dustbins too,’ she suggested.

Marnie insisted they make lunch – cheese on toast and a salad – and afterwards have a stroll round the garden. They dead-headed some of the sadder-looking  roses. They lifted the mirror  out of the flowerbed and  propped  it up by the garage, where Marnie thought  it looked  almost  deliberate,  like a mirror  designed  to extend the space in a corner of some well known garden off towards Glyndebourne, the name of which she couldn’t remember. Down by the summerhouse  she said, ‘I notice you’ve got rid of the poppies.’ Anna, who felt unable to admit to her daughter that the poppies had vanished overnight, leaving behind them a strip of earth so packed and dry that nothing  could have grown there for years, agreed that she had dug them up. ‘But I don’t see where you’ve put them,’ Marnie said. ‘They’re not in the compost.’

‘Oh, somewhere, darling. I expect I put them somewhere.’

Marnie hooked her arm through Anna’s. Each time they drew near the house, she steered them away again. ‘It’s such a nice day,’ she said, or, ‘Those paint fumes can’t be good for you,’ or, ‘Oh, Mum, smell all this!’ – indicating, with a delighted sweep of her arm  and  a clear subtext, the roses, the orchard,  the August air itself.

It was a wonderful day, Anna agreed cautiously, and she had loved lunch; but she must get back to work now.

‘I don’t know why you’re doing this,’ Marnie accused her.

‘These days, I don’t know why I’m doing anything,’ Anna said, trying to make Marnie laugh. ‘Oh darling, can’t you give me a bit of room?’

‘If you don’t go too far.’

It was Anna’s turn to be angry.

‘How far is that?’ she demanded. ‘This place was always really rather ordinary, Marnie. That was fine for your father. It was fine for you growing up. But now I want something different.’ Staring across at the summerhouse, she caught a fleeting glimpse of herself thirty years ago in a West London bathroom,  two o’clock in the morning. Fishes painted on the wall, amber-coloured  soap with a rosebud trapped  inside like someone else’s past – the past you’ll have, once you’re in the future. It’s the Millennium, or close to it. A dozen scented candles flicker, stuck to the bath surround  with their  own fat, throwing  on the rag-rolled  walls the shadows of twigs in vases encrusted with fake verdigris. The bathwater cooling around  your nipples but still acceptable as long as you don’t move too often. 2am, and Michael Kearney’s footsteps are heard upon the stair; his key is heard in Anna’s lock.