Pip had finished washing up now and began searching for a tea towel. Evelyn flinched as she pulled open drawer after drawer, all stuffed to the gunwales with rubbish, and was relieved when she eventually abandoned her quest, leaving the dishes to air dry. She wiped her hands on her jeans and came to sit down next to Evelyn at the piled-high table.

‘After Scarlet was born Joan continued to be scandalised. I thought that when the baby was here she’d mellow a little, but she never did. It was almost as if she wasn’t prepared to allow herself to love her niece. And she was so very loveable . . .’

There was a pause.

‘She died, didn’t she?’ asked Pip gently. ‘My mum told me.’

Evelyn nodded. Just thinking about Scarlet sent a stabbing pain straight to her heart, and she put a futile hand to her chest, as if that could ease it.

‘She was only three,’ she said. ‘Just a baby, and with her whole life ahead of her.’

‘That’s such a tragedy,’ Pip said.

‘Yes. You never get over the loss of your child,’ Evelyn added. ‘It haunts you forever.’

Evelyn watched as Pip ran her hand through her hair then closed her eyes, breathing slowly through her nose. She seemed to be struggling with some unspoken emotional response to what she had just heard. Had she lost a child, too? Was that what had brought her back from London? Evelyn was curious, but this was her story and so she kept going.

‘And then Joan died,’ she continued in as matter-of-fact a tone as she could manage so that she didn’t draw any attention to that part of the story. ‘And I just stayed here. I did mean to go back to London, to start working again, but somehow, I could never quite get myself together enough to go. And the years ticked by.’

It was such a long time since Evelyn had thought about her life in these terms, about how she had lost so many years. Now that she did, it felt like such a waste. She had only been thirty-four when Scarlet died. There had still been plenty of her life left, but she had let things get away from her. And then the years rolled by and picked up speed and nothing changed. And now it was all too late.

‘There’s only me and Nicholas left now. He’s my nephew, my brother Peter’s boy. Peter’s dead too, of course. A heart attack in his fifties. And soon I’ll die, and then the house will be sold, and no one will remember that the Mountcastles were ever here.’

‘I think you’d be surprised,’ said Pip. ‘I asked a few people about you when I was trying to find out where to return the diary to, and they all knew who you were.’