I missed them. It was as if they had written a play and constructed the set, and whenever I was with them I had a part to perform. I fell into it so easily: a secondary character, someone ordinary against whom the leads could shine. Now that they had packed up and left, I felt I had forgotten my lines.

But did Bill’s absence make me frantic?

He’d given me something I’d wanted since the first time he took my hand. It wasn’t love; nothing like it. It was knowledge. Bill took words I’d written on slips and turned them into places on my body. He introduced me to sensations that no fine sentence could come close to defining. Near its end, I’d heard the pleasure of it exhaled on my breath, felt my back arch and my neck stretch to expose its pulse. It was a surrender, but not to him. Like an alchemist, Bill had turned Mabel’s vulgarities and Tilda’s practicalities into something beautiful. I was grateful, but I was not in love.

It was Tilda I missed the most; her absence that left a misboding sorrow. She had ideas I wanted to understand and she said things I could not. She cared more for what mattered and less for what didn’t. When I was with her I felt I might do something extraordinary. With her gone, I feared I never would.

“Poorly again, Essy?” Lizzie asked, when I came into the kitchen for a glass of water. “You’re looking a bit pale, that’s for sure.”

Mrs. Ballard was checking the Christmas pudding she’d made a few months earlier and drizzling over some brandy. She looked at me through narrowed eyes, and a frown deepened the lines of her face. Lizzie poured me some water from the jug on the kitchen table, then went to the pantry and brought out a packet of digestives.

“Shop-bought biscuits, Mrs. B!” I said. “Did you know these were lurking in your pantry?”

She blinked, and her face relaxed. “Dr. Murray insists on McVitie’s. Reminds him of Scotland, he says.”

Lizzie passed me a biscuit. “It’ll settle your stomach,” she said.

Food was the last thing I wanted, but Lizzie insisted. I sat at the kitchen table and nibbled at the biscuit while Mrs. Ballard and Lizzie busied themselves around me. They got little done. When Lizzie wiped down the range for the third time, I finally asked if something was wrong.

“No, no, pet,” Mrs. Ballard was quick to say. “I’m sure everything will be all right.” But the frown returned to her face.

“Esme,” Lizzie said, finally putting down her cloth. “Will you come upstairs a minute?”