‘My mother died,’ Nancy began quietly. After that, the words frothed out of her. They wouldn’t stop. ‘I was eight and she was frail and the day after she gave birth to my brother she just faded away. I can remember it like it was yesterday. How ghostly she looked in that chair . . .’

Raymond whispered, ‘Oh, Nancy . . .’

‘I had to play mum to Frank. That’s my baby brother. I still think of him as a baby, though he’s sixteen years old and six foot tall and as strapping as the rest of them in our village. I cleaned him and cooked for him and taught him his letters. And it was good, for a time, just the two of us with our father in our little cottage. My father got us by, but by the time I was fully grown he couldn’t do it any longer. He took a fall at the pit where he worked. Then it was up and in his lungs. They call it pneumoconiosis. By the end, the doctor had him on so much laudanum that he was barely there with us at all.’

For a moment she could not go on. She hadn’t spoken of these things since she’d arrived at the Buckingham, but that did not mean she’d forgotten. They were a part of her, imprinted on her heart. Giving voice to them now was a release, but it was a torment too. I miss him, she realised. I miss them both terribly. I want Frank here, with me, not up there – waiting, just waiting, to go the same way as our father. Because that’s what will happen. That’s what always happens to men like that. They work and they work until, finally, they just drop.

‘I was there with my father on the night that he passed and when he went . . . Well, it was only me and Frank, on the kindness of the parish. I worked hard, Raymond, to lift us up out of it. I stitched and I sewed for any who’d have me. I’m not ashamed to say that I begged. And now my brother’s old enough to take work himself, why, I got on a train to London and I came here and I . . . Don’t you see? That’s why I came. To find a new way of living. Not to stay in my little town, marry some miner’s son, and have the same thing happen all over again. I want a different life – for me, as well as Frank . . .’

Raymond did not realise, at first, that Nancy had only stopped speaking because she was crying. The music from the gramophone had come to a crescendo – and then, as suddenly as it had started, it was gone, the number coming to an end and the needle just dancing in the groove.