I say his room, although it was actually Eleanor’s, our mother’s. She used to paint there because it has the best light in the afternoons – it’s at the front of the house, but at the far corner. You can see part of the herb garden from one of the windows, and glimpse the lines of thyme that she sowed in the cracks between the paving stones. Now it’s the spare room: Dad painted it white, even the floorboards, and a rug covers the worst oil-paint stains. When the sun warms the wood, I can still smell the linseed.

I don’t go in there much.

I’m procrastinating.

So, as I was saying, Bethany was playing with Ruby-May. They would have gone outside. Bethany doesn’t like being cooped up or staying still. And it is an amazing garden if you’re a small child and you’re fearless, or haven’t yet learned to be fearful. Bethany would have been tearing around the place: hide-and-seek in the orchard, singing and swinging Ruby-May on the rope strung from the large tree in the corner, racing across the lawn, mooing at the cows in the field at the end. She doesn’t have the patience for imaginary games, so they probably avoided the wooden Wendy house with its teaset laid out ready for a pretend birthday party; and I can’t believe she’d have gone near the ruins of the old cottage, after what happened there when we were kids. She also avoided the pond.

The pond is large, for a garden. In summer, when the water level dips, it still comes up to my waist. Our mother designed it: that August, the flags had finished flowering, but there were water lilies and dragonflies patrolling its borders. Eleanor used to sit on the sloping bank on a mossy bench and paint it. Once we were born, she refused to have it filled in, although Dad said a child can drown in just two inches of water. Maybe even then he didn’t quite trust our mother’s maternal instincts.

Dad had the local builder put up a low fence around the pond: it’s high enough to deter a small child, and he installed a gate with a Yale lock on it. You need a key to open it. Eleanor hated it and stopped painting the water lilies. No loss to the art world, I thought, when I was younger. It’s not like she’s bloody Monet. But I know now that some artists still hold it against my father. It was all part of the story they told about him: how he tried to lock Eleanor up, hedge her in. Control her. Make her look after her own children.