‘I think I will get your elevenses.’ Laura dropped the bottles into the sack. As she carried it downstairs she thought, It can’t be. It’s my nasty suspicious mind. She tipped the sack into the dustbin.

In the kitchen she filled the kettle to make coffee and washed her hands. It was so long ago, she thought, I may be wrong. I wish I was. Why did I not realise at the time? What good would it have done?

She remembered the party, Nicholas and Emily’s birthday. Everybody drank too much. She remembered waking next morning, the smell on the pillow. Christopher had been at the party with his mother and father, good old Ned—but Ned used that stuff from Trumpers. She remembered it well, it was quite different from—Did anything happen? Nothing? Surely nothing. I’d know if it had, would—I—not? One does not forget smells or what might have—

It was at least twenty years ago. Laura washed her hands again, made the coffee, carried the tray upstairs. Halfway up the stairs she stopped as twenty years of suppressed memory snapped. She remembered waking in her bedroom. The door closing as Nicholas left the room. The smell of his hair on the pillow, the stickiness on her nightdress and inner thighs. A mistlethrush had been singing outside in an apple tree, as one was singing now. Had the birdsong unlocked her memory? Her head had been aching. It was clear now. Had she wept? She remembered her heart thumping as it thumped now. She had bathed, oh yes, she had bathed and later Emily had accused her of taking all the hot water. Plotted to kill Nicholas? Contemplated suicide? She had forced herself to forget, buried her terrible anger deep, an anger which welled up now almost choking her as she stood on the stairs gripping the tray.

In the garden a robin chirped up in the lilac bushes in contrapuntal harmony to the mistlethrush, just as it had then all those years ago.

She continued up the stairs.

‘What was it you wanted to tell me?’ She laid the tray across Emily’s lap.

Emily pursed her mouth. Nicholas paced the room. Laura sat on the bed at Emily’s feet. ‘You look better,’ she said, ‘both of you. You have recovered from your flu.’ It was less easy to like them when they were well. ‘You look positively spry,’ she said. ‘What’s the secret? What have you to tell me?’ She watched Nicholas. ‘Nicholas—’ she began.

‘What?’

‘Nothing.’ What would be the use of asking him if he remembered the incident of all those years ago? If he did and he habitually trolled beds, I would feel no different, no sadder than I do. I did not, thank God, get pregnant.

Nicholas was speaking. ‘What did you say? Sorry, I missed—’

‘You never listen,’ Emily shouted in sudden exasperation.

‘Hush, Em,’ said Nicholas. ‘I was saying, Laura darling, that we have decided to have a living-in couple to look after us—’