‘Beatriz?’ Ali asked gently. ‘Please will you come and eat with us?’

The old lady shook her head. ‘I’m not hungry.’

‘But you must be,’ Ali said. ‘I don’t know when you last had a proper meal. Maybe you’re hungry without realising it. Maybe if you came downstairs with me and—’

‘Ali, I can’t eat, I have no wish to eat, and you have matters to talk about with Michael that don’t include me.’

‘Oh, Beatriz.’ She longed for her to say Ali, my girl.

‘Go,’ Beatriz said. ‘Make your husband happy, and leave me be. I’m best left here, on my own.’ And she turned her face away so emphatically that Ali released her hand, kissed her cheek, told her she loved her, and left the room. She’d always imagined herself dearly loved by Beatriz, and indeed she had been – until she’d made Michael unhappy. Then Ali had understood with the full force of a revelation that Beatriz’s love for her had been conditional, dependent upon the rules of the household, and that this was the cult of the McCormacks in action: this was the closing of the ranks.

A little over a week later, Beatriz was dead, and it was as if she’d willed it, walking towards God and the promise of eternal life. Even Michael, who knew there was a solid, biological cause behind every human death, didn’t deny that she seemed to have initiated and stage-managed her own exit from a world for which she’d lost all energy. He’d been the one to find her, in the early evening, and the sound of his weeping brought Ali running to find him, her gut churning because she’d assumed she was the cause, but then there he was, on his knees by Beatriz’s bed, crying more than he had when either of his parents passed away, because nobody had loved Michael more than Beatriz. He stopped when Ali came into the room, pulled himself together as if he felt unmanned by his grief, but she’d gathered him in her arms, and they’d cried together for the loss of her. If Beatriz could have seen their embrace, it might have brought her some joy.

Later though, downstairs, waiting for the funeral director to come and take Beatriz’s body away from the house, Ali said, ‘Michael, I have this terrible feeling that this is my doing.’ She was unburdening herself of her darkest fear, trusting him to dismiss it as nonsense. ‘Her death, I mean. I’m afraid I somehow caused it.’