‘Your father made sure you were taken care of,’ she had said. ‘Your real father, that is. He provided for you, and for your children, but secretly; so that when I go, you shall never want.’

‘You’re not going to go,’ he had smiled at her, and taken her hand between his. In its white summer glove, it had felt like a dead starling, all bones and feathers.

But whether she had experienced a premonition or not, a kind of Tarot-reading from the weather, and the clouds, and the postures of the reverend gentlemen who were playing croquet, she had gone, within three weeks of the croquet party, of a summer cold that turned to pneumonia. At the age of thirty-three, Peter Ransome found himself to be an orphan.

The effect had caught him off-balance. He had not been prepared for the abrupt loneliness of it; nor for the pain that he would suffer as he tidied up his mother’s affairs with Messrs Winchell & Golightly, Solicitors and Commissioners for Oaths, of Croydon; and as he cleared up his mother’s house in Kennington, in South London, not far from the Oval cricket ground. As he came across photographs and memorabilia from his mother’s past: a sepia print of his stepfather with the Bishop of Woolwich, another of his mother arm-in-arm in some scrubby landscape with Cecil Rhodes, a lion’s-tooth necklet, a silver snuffbox with an embossed view of Victoria Falls, he began to feel as if he no longer knew who he was, or why he was here. He had inherited all of these fragments from other people’s lives, but there was no longer anybody in the whole world to whom he was directly related.

His stepfather, the Reverend Hugh Ransome, had died of a seizure the day before Queen Victoria’s Jubilee celebrations, on 21 June 1897. The excitement of arranging a party for Kennington’s children and old folks had been too much for him: that, and the heat.

His real father had died a year before that, drowned, after a well-publicised incident on the cruise liner, Andromeda, off Madagascar. One witness had insisted that Mr Blitz had ‘recklessly and with aforethought’ hurled himself over the rail of the quoits deck into the Indian Ocean, and had swallowed enough water to sink himself before the ship could be brought about. But Mrs Blitz had strenuously denied any suggestions of suicide. Her husband had been ‘in bustling health’, she had told the coroner, prettily, and he had been eager to start up a new property business in Cape Town.

But now Peter was here, in the big redbrick house in Montacute Road, overlooking a tired triangle of grass and plane trees, with his mother’s jewellery case open in front of him, and a diamond between his fingers that was bigger than he would have thought possible. It had to be real, he was convinced of it, even though he had no expertise in diamonds, and no means of testing the stone, apart from using it to scratch his name on the bedroom window, which somehow did not seem like a very reverent idea. In the five years since his stepfather had died, Peter had gradually become aware that the love between his mother and his real father had been something intense, and very special, and that even their eventual separation had not been able to extinguish it.