‘Come and see your room,’ Fliss says. ‘Lunch isn’t quite ready.’

She picks up Cara’s small bag and leads the way along passages, up the stairs and along the corridor to the west wing. The rooms look down into the orchard, across the kitchen gardens, away to the west.

‘They’re quite small,’ says Fliss, almost apologetically, ‘but at least Lizzie had a little sitting-room so she could have some privacy when she needed it. And there’s a shower in this cubbyhole, with a loo, but if you want a bath you’ll have to muck in down the corridor. It wasn’t easy to drag The Keep into even the twentieth century so this is as good as it gets.’

Cara looks around at the simplicity of the two small rooms, the pretty French furniture, the watercolours on the walls.

‘It’s perfect,’ she says. ‘Thank you very much. It’s so kind of you, Fliss.’

‘Not a bit of it,’ says Fliss. ‘We love having people here. You’re welcome to stay for as long as you need to. It must be incredibly difficult to try to decide where you want to be when you’ve never had a settled base. The navy was like that, but I always had The Keep to come to whenever I needed it.’ She glances round as if to make sure everything is in order and then smiles at Cara. ‘Come down when you’re ready,’ she says, and goes out.

Cara picks up her bag and puts it on an old pine trunk at the foot of the bed. Then she crosses to the window. She imagines the orchard foaming with blossom in the spring; the kitchen garden, surrounded by its rugged stone walls and crisscrossed by grassy paths, filled with produce. She tries to imagine what it must be like to live with such continuity, the changing of the seasons, a sense of belonging.

She turns back into the room, opens her bag and takes out a few things. A mirror with a mahogany frame hangs above the small chest of drawers. Cara brushes her hair without looking herself in the eye. She can’t bear to do that, to see the other self, the disapproval looking back at her. She prefers others to be her mirror so that she can imagine herself as they see her, not as she really is. She remembers how she danced before the mirror at the house in Sussex, how she talked and laughed with her mirror-image, her friend. How long it’s been since she could look at her reflection and not see the accuser looking back at her.