She went out to make the tea, leaving Pip on her own. Now that she was here as an invited guest, it felt more appropriate to have a good look around and take in her surroundings. She stood up and took a little tour about the room. As well as the two armchairs, a matching uninviting couch and the china display cabinet, there was also a mahogany bookshelf. It contained an ancient Encyclopaedia Britannica, and leather- and gilt-bound copies of what looked like the complete works of Dickens and Shakespeare. The leather, which might once have been crimson, had faded to a dull ox-blood colour and was stiff and brittle. Pip pulled Great Expectations off the shelf and opened it carefully. The pages were tissue-paper thin and the font so tiny it was hard to imagine anyone could ever read it, but the book had a well-handled feel to it. Someone had loved it once. She slipped it back into its space.

The fireplace was squat and ugly, tiled in buttercream-coloured tiles and with a large hearth tiled in the same. One of the tiles had cracked, spoiling the whole; something heavy had been dropped on it, and Pip thought she could imagine the fuss that would have been made at such carelessness. This didn’t feel like the kind of house where cracked tiles would be acceptable, and yet it hadn’t been replaced. If the china in the cabinet was anything to go by, it wouldn’t have been through a lack of funds, so maybe the broken tile had been left on purpose as a constant reminder of someone’s mistake. Evelyn’s, perhaps?

On top of the display cabinet were two black-and-white photographs, each in austere black frames. The first was of a couple on their wedding day, or at least she assumed it was their wedding day. The woman was carrying a bunch of roses, but her dress was neither long nor white and not at all what Pip would think of as a wedding dress, and neither she nor the assumed groom were smiling. The second was of three children, a boy with blond curls in a smart sailor sweater and two little girls in pinafores. Pip looked more closely. The smallest one must be Evelyn, Pip thought, scanning for any feature that looked familiar, but finding nothing. The little girl beamed out at the camera, her head tipped coquettishly to one side. She looked like a proper character, much as Evelyn had described Scarlet. Then she turned her focus to the older girl – Joan, maybe? Pip searched her face for the cruelty that Evelyn’s diary had hinted at, but could see no sign of it. She looked like a perfectly ordinary child, if a little solemn in comparison to her sister.