Her father’s suicide left seven-year-old Emily with an impression: that she wasn’t enough for him. That she wasn’t enough to keep him alive. Why would Ian kill himself when he had Emily as a daughter? Maybe she’d said or done something that she couldn’t recall and couldn’t identify as coldness or misbehaviour given how complicated the adult world was, given her inability to understand why people did the weird things they did. As a teenager, she began to second-guess herself in class and around friends. At night she replayed conversations in her mind to identify when she’d misspoken and what she might have said otherwise. Her self-doubt interjected whenever she began to feel confident. One way she concealed this lack of confidence was by never asking for affirmation, by pretending not to care for other people’s opinions of her.

As Emily grew older she became ever more curious about Ian Asquith, to her mother’s obvious disappointment. She intended to be a good historian of her life. But the Asquiths, supposedly her kin, wanted nothing to do with the girl. Ian had two siblings, a brother and sister, both in Buckinghamshire, and when she was sixteen Emily wrote to each of them. Neither responded. And Emily’s mother offered only a few flat stories about him, none that satisfied, none revealing enough, unless Asquith was in fact a flat person. Emily came to the view that her mother was withholding information that would have been unpleasant to discuss. The mother wanted to move on! The daughter could not.

Emily’s mother, Heidi, would say the following: There was only so much you could know about the past. Only so much you could know about your own story. Emily found it difficult to accept these loud conditions.

It had occurred to her that the article about Lucky’s was a substitute for the real story of her father.

Sometimes, at night, she would close her eyes and her dead father spoke to her. She imagined him saying what she needed him to say. I’m sorry. I made a mistake. We are alike, but you won’t end up like me. You won’t have a life like mine.

5.

A card slipped under the door of Emily’s hotel room. Michael had called twice while she was out. Please call home, was the message.

‘The thing is,’ said Michael, ‘I do love you.’

‘No you don’t. You really don’t.’

‘I’m in love with two people at the same time.’

‘I don’t think you are!’

‘My relationship with Therese was entirely unavoidable. It’s something that happened.’

‘Yes, it certainly happened.’

‘All right. Look, your mother called,’ said Michael. ‘She forgot you’d gone to Australia. Have you told her about …’

‘About you fucking this girl? No. That’s a conversation I can look forward to sometime soon.’