I tried to smile—that poor young widow was being nice, after all. But I couldn’t manage it. People being nice to you after someone has made you feel like a criminal or an enemy is just like sticking cardboard in your window after a bomb has blasted all the glass out of it. The hole is stopped up, but the glass is still smashed and you can’t see through the window anymore. Everything in the room is uglier and darker.

Mummy would have poked fun at these people, helped me to laugh it off, swept up the invisible broken glass, painted pretty patterns on the cardboard in the hole. Alone, I was helpless with anger. I didn’t want to live in the ugly dark room with the smashed window.

“I’m sorry about your husband,” I murmured.

And that was that—nobody said anything else to one another throughout the whole eight-mile bus ride to Stonehaven.

But after we got off the bus, and Jane and I were by ourselves being scoured by the salt wind as we made our way very slowly down the High Street to the library, she asked me about my parents.

“Mummy was English,” I told her. “She was born in London. Her father was in the Royal Navy, based in Jamaica, and directed a band for them. He died—both her parents died before she was married. But she was already grown up then, teaching music at a secondary school for boys in Kingston. I look like her, except that she was blond! We have the same face, same shape of eyes and mouth. I can wear all her clothes now—well, if I take them in a bit at the top.”

It felt good to talk about her, I realized.

“She gave harp and piano lessons, and used to play at weddings and things like that. Sometimes I got to go along and sit in a corner gobbling wedding cake.”

“How did she meet your father?” Jane asked.

“They both sang. They were in the same operatic society. He was a seaman, too, like her father, but…” My daddy, Lenford Adair, always bringing me presents from faraway places and shouting with laughter at my school stories. Arguing politics with our landladies in London in his sea-deep baritone voice. My very earliest memory is of him singing on the veranda, while I lay in my cot under the mosquito net in the dark warm night and lizards scratched on the screens and the window slats. Come sit on my knee and sing, Carrie! he’d call softly to Mummy. I’ve missed you, girl.