For a long time, during Emily’s teenage years, the spontaneously kind Rick had managed to disappoint his bookish stepdaughter because he had not the slightest interest in literature, not even the newspaper, and would plainly state, I’ve never read a book in my life, and say so proudly at times, the way some people boast of not having a single filling in their mouth. When Emily grew up and went off to university in London, she’d cruelly convey her stepfather’s claim to friends, in part because it was an odd thing for a person to say, and in part because it spoke to the distance between his life and hers. Later, she came to see that what she’d once taken for disappointment, and betrayal even, in the worst fevers of adolescent contempt, was partly something else: she wanted Rick to be a little more like Ian. But without the catastrophe.

‘Rick’s not enjoying the long winter this year,’ said Heidi. ‘But how’s Mr Michael? He must be missing you.’

‘Let’s not call him Mr Michael. He’s fine, we spoke a few minutes ago,’ said Emily. She wasn’t ready to tell her parents about Therese. ‘Mum, I know that Dad—Ian, I mean—lived in Sydney for a few years during the war. What do you know about his life here? He must have said something about that time. Do you know where he lived?’

‘Oh, God. Who knows? He never talked about the place. The man was a mystery.’

‘He must have mentioned Sydney to you,’ Emily persisted.

A pause over the phone. ‘Maybe there is a little detail I may not have mentioned.’

Emily opened her notebook. Please Mum, she thought, give me something of substance. Tell me where I come from.

‘Once, he said he’d published some writing, a poem or a play, in a little magazine. I think it was after university. It might have been during his posting in Australia. Ian wouldn’t show me the play or poem, or whatever it was: said he didn’t have a copy—that’s how much he thought of the thing. He said he wrote under his initials, I.W. Asquith.’

‘You’ve never told me this! Why didn’t you mention that he’d written something? Can you understand why it’s meaningful for me to know that my father was a writer?’

‘He wasn’t a real writer. It’s not important. I’d forgotten.’

Heidi used avoidance and silence to cope with Ian Asquith’s suicide. She believed that repression could heal the mind. All her life Emily had tried to convey that her own brain did not work that way, did not forget by command.

Emily said: ‘It is important! You shouldn’t forget such stuff. Writing was something he did in his life and it’s something I do in mine.’