‘Oh, I don’t,’ she replied breezily. ‘I just heard her name, that was all.’

She tried to feign insouciance. She could tell from the way her mother had stopped washing the dishes at the sink that she wasn’t convinced by her explanation, but it would have to do.

Taking a piece of toast from the toast rack, Pip began buttering it with measured concentration. Then her father started talking about the wheat crop, and the conversation moved away from Evelyn Mountcastle.

16

Monday rolled round again. Pip had spent most of her weekend engrossed in Evelyn’s world and was slightly resentful that she had to break off to go to work. When her mother had first made the arrangement for her to help Audrey out, it hadn’t been anyone’s intention that it would be a full-time position, just a little something to get her away from the farm, to help with her rehabilitation, but over the weeks Pip had just started to turn up at the shop every day and no one seemed to object. If she didn’t make her way there each morning then she would be stuck with nothing but the contents of her own mind for company, and that wasn’t a healthy place for her to be.

Of course, she was fully aware that by failing to face the darkness in her head she was simply prolonging the time that it would take for her to recover, but that was the best she could manage at the moment. The thing with Dominic was a classic example. He had been her partner for well over two years before the accident. She had moved into his swanky flat, learned to like his friends and share his extravagant taste in cashmere jumpers and silk handkerchiefs. His life had become her life, and she had even dared to think that they might have a long future together.

And now he was gone, evaporated from her world like the steam from his Gaggia coffee machine, and she had barely wept a single tear. She was astute enough to understand that her lack of reaction was not a reflection of how upset she was about the break-up, but more to do with her overall state of mind. She had become an emotional wasteland. Nothing seemed to touch her any more, nothing could pierce the carapace that she had enclosed herself in because no emotional hurt could be as terrible or as devastating as the one she was already dealing with. Or not dealing with.

When she did allow herself to think about the accident, gingerly, tentatively, like a tongue touching a mouth ulcer, it felt as if she would never get back to the way she had been before. She hadn’t had a full-blown panic attack for a month now, so that had to be a good sign, but flashbacks still haunted her. A blast on a car horn, the screech of tyres on tarmac, the wailing call of a siren could all trigger her fear. Other things made her heart race, too: a car pulling out from a side road, pedestrians standing too close to the pavement’s edge as they waited for a gap in the traffic to cross the road. Any one of these was enough to prompt a vivid rerun of the accident in her mind’s eye.