‘After that, they kept staring at me – Val and Guy. Could not take their eyes off me!’ She sounded delighted with herself, and then she caught Beth’s gaze and her expression grew serious, a touch of defiance in her arched brow. ‘For once, they were looking at me. Not at Anouk.’

Pictures of Anouk were all over the house. A sulky beauty, she stared out from frames in the sitting room and kitchen, in the bedrooms and hall. Some were studio shots, others less artfully taken but just as persuasive. Corinne was hanging there too on the walls with their flaking paint, but it did not require an actual accounting of all the images dotted around the house to know there were far more of Anouk than of her younger sister. Beth had wondered was it only that way since the girl had gone? But now she began to suspect that it had always been so, and her heart felt pained at the thought of Corinne constantly eclipsed by this sister, a feeling Beth could relate to.

‘You should do it,’ Corinne said then, her eyes flickering quickly over Beth’s head and shoulders. A challenge there.

Instinctively, Beth’s hand went up to touch her hair. Long, nondescript, fuzzy in the humid heat, it was hardly the lodestone of her appeal. But still, the thought of cutting it all off caused her insides to seize with fright. Corinne was already upon her, enthusiastically fingering strands and tucking them up and under.

‘Like this,’ she said, ‘and this,’ turning Beth so she was confronted by her own startled reflection in the glazing of a cabinet.

‘I don’t know …’

‘It would be chic! It would be cool. You could finally see your face. All the time, you are hidden under all of this. It would free you.’

Corinne’s voice was charged with excitement. All traces of boredom had fled from her tone, her manner.

‘And you have this freckle here,’ she went on, touching the place just underneath Beth’s jaw and sending a thrill of nerves shooting down her neck, ‘so cute, but never seen. Think how sweet you would look!’

Beth was scared, but equally she burned with pleasure under the heat of Corinne’s attention, her vivid ministrations, and was desperate to prolong it.

‘What about my scar?’ she asked, fingers reaching to trace the familiar ridge of it running down the back of her neck.

‘But that would be the whole point! Why hide it? It’s beautiful! To show it is to be brave. Don’t you see? You have to do it!’

Seized with conviction, Corinne declared: ‘I could do it for you. I’ve cut hair before.’

She was shuffling through the contents of the utensils drawer in the kitchen before Beth could even voice an objection. It was only when she turned and came at Beth, the scissors gleaming in her hand, that Beth drew back from her and said: