‘So,’ I went on, ‘do you want to come with me?’

‘To the harbour cottage,’ she replied plainly, spreading marmalade on her toast, ‘or to the mainland?’

I’d thought she would leap from her stool, immediately pack a bag; that she might have one already filled, the mainland in mind. How often had she baited Dad with the seditious idea of a holiday, a cruise, the possibility of visiting Paul…

‘I think we should go to the well,’ she said ‘take something of Dad’s to trade for the “absolute truth”. He can help me to decide what to do.’

I chanced a smile; she was obviously joking. Her voice was as playful as the one she used on the little children at chapel – the one she’d no doubt used on me while I was growing up – a furnishing of the trivial and the fantastic with a business-like seriousness.

‘Now, what did your father hold dearer than anything else?’ she asked, chewing toast, casting her eyes around the room, which was empty of everything apart from our day-to-day essentials. Still we waited for the eviction that would inevitably come.

It crept up on me, slowly; she was speaking in earnest

‘You, Mum,’ I told her. ‘Dad held you dearer than anything else.’

She looked at me levelly, shook her head.

‘No,’ she said. ‘It was you. Always you.’

Of course, I thought, I am Leah, a mistress of betrayal right from the start. A child created in love that stole all the love for herself.

‘Do you want to throw me down the well, then?’ I laughed nervously.

‘Sometimes,’ she replied, with a straight face. ‘But I’d rather you caught that ship.’

We walked down the brick path, through the tunnel of sycamore and birch. The showers of March had made everything sprout lushly, and April was offering us a small taste of sun, penetrating the leaves, the ground dancing with soft snatches of light. I tried to seal a picture of it in my mind – the smell, the feeling. I plucked a nascent sycamore key from the floor and put the hard lime-coloured unreadiness of it in my pocket.

My mother, a long cardigan wrapped around her, talked about Martha Signal, how she had pulled my mother aside on the cobbles to say that she knew her elder son was straying, misbehaving. She was ashamed of him, she said, but also, she felt guilty – she and her husband had not done enough to counter the influence of others, and they would have to work harder to make sure Michael, their younger, was protected. ‘Don’t think me bad,’ Martha had said, ‘when I tell you that I still love Luke though, very, very much.’ I thought of the boy, the man, sprawled on his back after I’d thrown him to the ground, anger twisting his face, the blood-hot sense of relief that had drenched me when I realised he wasn’t Ben.