Eva shook her head. ‘I don’t know. She had already gone a bit nuts when I met her. Though not too bad. Sneaking out of boarding school and smoking and things like that. She was always in trouble. I think she did it to make Andrew angry. We didn’t see her, you know, after she left university. The last time she was here she took a very expensive painting. Andrew changed the locks and said she was not to come here again. She came one night, maybe three or four years ago, banging on the door and screaming. Andrew was very upset but he said we mustn’t go down.’

Three or four years ago. I wondered if Flora had been with Chloe. How could they have turned her away?

In the end it was surprisingly easy to wrest guardianship of Flora away from the Tates. I had come believing that I would be up for a battle, but there was essentially no opposition. They didn’t want Flora, I realised. She would have presented them with a whole new set of problems. Like Chloe, in all her unruly, ugly pain had. Something to shut a door against.

When Eva came outside to say goodbye and stood in the late morning sunshine, I put my hand on her arm. ‘You know, you and Andrew are welcome to see Flora any time. You’re her grandparents. It would be nice for her to know she has you as her extended family.’

Eva looked down at my hand and then up at my face. She seemed anxious and distracted, as if she had just remembered something that she had forgotten to do. ‘Yes, of course,’ she said. ‘I’m sure Andrew will want to see her. We’ll be in touch.’

She stood there in the doorway watching me as I walked away.

Before I drove back to Suffolk I stopped by at Stanley Crescent to collect some proper winter clothes. There was a pile of mail on the hall table. Nearly a year after his death and sometimes letters still come for Leo. At first I slipped them through the shredder in his study, but it made me uneasy to see his name on the envelope cut to pieces like that. As if I were doing him some harm. Names mattered so much to Leo. I thought of the quiet pride with which he had shown me his family plot in the churchyard in Somerset, all those rows of Cliftons, stretching back through the centuries. Even the way he signed his name, with a confident flourish, spoke of the way that he knew his place in the world. Leo never had to go seeking.