‘Oh, yes, please, Auntie,’ Annie said. She was always hungry. She ate like a horse and seemed to burn off food like one as well.

‘Fanny!’ Aunt Hatt said, calling commandingly, and a thin young woman with pale hair under a cap appeared from another room further along the passage.

‘Make us all a pot of tea, will you, please?’ Aunt Harriet said.

Fanny muttered, ‘Yes, Mrs Watts,’ and disappeared towards the kitchen, peering curiously at the sisters as she did so.

‘Come on in . . . We’ve a cook, Mrs Sullivan – she and Fanny come in during the daytime. Now, you come and sit comfy, my dears, and we’ll have our tea.’

The room smelt strongly of lavender mingled with coal dust from the grate. Margaret felt she had stepped into quite another world from that of their own puritanical home, in which any superfluous clutter or possession was forbidden.

The visible parts of the walls were covered in deep red paper patterned with gold-and-white flowers, and the curtains were in a similar shade. The mantelpiece was draped in velvet of the same warm red and crowded with a dense array of knick-knacks: candlesticks, china vases with lavender sprigs poking from them, ornaments and photographs, all competing for space with a large and loudly ticking brass carriage clock. The polished wooden floor was overlain with rugs and the room crowded with furniture.

Aunt Harriet left the room for a few moments to supervise the maid. As promising rattling sounds came from the kitchen, the girls removed their hats and, as instructed, settled in the leather chairs beside the unlit fire. The polished fender and mellow tick of the clock were homely and soothing.

Margaret sat back in her chair with a sigh of relief. They were here at last. Things felt safe and welcoming and she was eager to get to know her mother’s brother and Aunt Hatt too. But just now, she felt a sudden longing to sit back and go to sleep.

Annie, still alert, was looking curiously about her. There was a gilt-framed mirror over the fireplace, and on the wall opposite the window hung a painting of two little blonde children hand in hand in the waves of a sunlit beach.

‘You look like a bird in a new nest,’ Margaret remarked. She nodded at the painting, thinking of their own rare holidays by the sea, when they had a mother as well as a father, and of the golden innocence of the children. She was still fragile as a reed with shock after all that had happened. ‘That’s what we used to be like.’

‘We still are,’ Annie said, turning to her passionately. But her face creased with concern. ‘Are you all right? Not feeling . . . ill?’ She was always so worried, so protective after Margaret’s years as an invalid.

Margaret drew in a deep breath. ‘Yes. I’m quite all right. It was just the heat, I think.’