So Beatriz had quietly cared for Ali and made her pots of tea the way she liked it (brown and strong) and rubbed oils into her bare feet and ankles when she was pregnant with Thea, then Stella, and sewn cool linen dresses the shape of small tepees to accommodate the growing bumps. She’d made her miraculous canja de galinha when Ali was sick, or sad, or just plain hungry, and in return Ali made Beatriz delicately lacy English pancakes on Sunday mornings, watched Ealing comedies with her, and old episodes of Coronation Street, and taught her to sing ‘On Ilkley Moor Baht ’at’, which Beatriz liked to perform at the sink, or at the sewing machine, with all the mournful fire of fado, in a passable Yorkshire accent.

Today, Beatriz was sitting in her usual spot in the kitchen, directly below the whirring wooden paddles of the old ceiling fan, where the stirred air cooled her face and head. The sleeves of her pink and purple housecoat were rolled up, her bony elbows resting on the counter, a cup of strong, black Portuguese coffee between her hands. She was listening hard, to the silence. Nothing wrong with silence; nothing at all. In fact, Beatriz enjoyed silence if it was the right kind, the quiet, restful, easy kind: the holy silence of an empty church, say. But the silence now, in the McCormack house, was heavy and potent, and Beatriz knew that Ali was right at the centre of it. The girl – Beatriz always thought of Ali as a girl: as her girl – was in the room above the kitchen, the room the family had always called the study, although until Michael brought Ali here, it had been largely unused – at least since James McCormack’s death in 1983 – by any of them. Now it was filled with Ali’s reference books and novels – the novels she liked to read, not the novels she’d written, which Beatriz had seen were of no interest at all to Ali after they were published, even this latest one, the one that had started this fuss and fandango with the newspapers, the television, the radio.