After the service, he held my hand as we joined the parade, following the band and swinging our arms back and forth to ‘The British Grenadiers’. Zac sang along, and I loved that he knew every word. We were at the tail end, and when I finally glimpsed Milly and Peggy and James again, they were getting further and further ahead as we processed through the town.

I tugged at Zac’s arm, smiling. ‘Shall we catch them up?’

It was as if I had flicked a switch, turning him from happy to sad. ‘Don’t you want to be with me?’

‘Forever.’

‘The three of them are a family. It’s the two of us now.’ He smiled. ‘Or three. Yes?’ He put a hand on my tummy. ‘We’re making our own family. Aren’t we?’

‘Yes.’ I smiled up at him. When I broke his gaze, I realised that I had lost sight of my best friend and my surrogate parents. As far long as I could remember, I had walked with them, and until the last few years, with my grandmother too, claiming James’s arm during the Remembrance Sunday commemorations that St Ives did so beautifully.

‘Doesn’t that make you happy?’

‘Yes.’ I nodded to confirm it. ‘That’s a lovely thing. Yes.’ It was what I had always wanted. And I could see he was right about my not being a part of the family of three that was Peggy and James and Milly. But to be without them in that place, on that day, was like having a piece of myself cut away.

Now
The Backwards House

Two years and five months later

Bath, Tuesday, 2 April 2019

The country lane that Maxine’s driver is speeding along is lined with golden daffodils. They flutter and dance and twinkle on their green banks in exactly the way Wordsworth said.

I have the sense that Maxine is watching me, though she is slumped against the cream-coloured leather car seat and seeming to look at her own lap, where her hands are resting. Her nails, as usual, are long and perfectly manicured. The polish is what my grandmother calls dragon-lady red, and matches Maxine’s lipstick. I have never seen a chip in that polish.

‘Where are we going?’

‘Not far.’ She answers like a parent. Or at least how I think parents answer, because my own have been dead for too long for me to know this from experience, and I am not a parent myself, however much I try to tell myself that she counted and I am.

The car enters a neighbourhood on the outskirts of Bath. Because the houses here are built on top of old quarries, they get alarming cracks from subsidence, so walls split and ceilings buckle, hurling dark-grey plaster dust and chunks of building into the rooms.