There was an enormous vase of magnolias on the table in the sitting room. For a moment I was sure they must be artificial; they looked so starkly perfect sitting there with a shaft of winter sun falling on them. But when I rubbed the petals between my fingers they were soft and dewy, like the cheek of a child. The housekeeper must still have been ordering fresh flowers every week, as she had for all the years that Leo had lived there. How long would the house be scrupulously maintained if I simply disappeared? Would invisible hands continue to dust and polish and arrange flowers in cut-glass vases?

I stood in the hallway. Lucian had once told me that the house reminded him of a fancy hotel and it struck me that he was right; that this was the way I had felt at times about Stanley Crescent. The house had been furnished by an interior decorator; everything was exquisitely tasteful and full of subdued opulence. The furniture and antiques that had come from Leo’s family were at La Mirande, and most of my books and personal things were there too. I could redecorate Stanley Crescent in any way I liked, Leo had said when we were married, or at the very least redo one of the upstairs rooms for a study for myself. I brought some sample books of Pierre Frey wallpapers home. There was one called ‘Dreams of India’. Painted in pale watercolours, it depicted shimmering visions of elaborate Mughal palaces, elephants walking through vast still lakes, men in elaborate turbans with twirling moustaches. It was an imperial dream of India, but certainly not the country that I knew.

In the end I never changed anything at Stanley Crescent. It seemed too enormous a task to attempt to impress myself onto the house. And it felt wrong somehow to undo what someone else had so carefully and expensively put together.

Standing there staring at the arrangement of magnolias, it seemed to me that in some ways this was how I have lived my life – in designs of others’ makings. But I am not blameless, far from it. I have willingly embraced every role I played: dutiful daughter, devoted wife, muse and mistress. In so many ways, Max, I invented myself for you. How I thrived on your adoration, your compliments, your praise. You, in a garden on your knees before me, your head cradled against me, my hands in your hair. Surely the tragic lovers are given mercy, I always believed, looked upon tenderly by history, even if they are deluded. Even with the example of my own mother before me, I believed this. But we were careless, Max, careless with our own lives and the lives of others. We imagined we were gods, disdaining what we considered to be ordinary. We are not blameless.