She opened the wardrobe and groped through all the party dresses for the one that hung at the back, a nineteen fifties dress in cream, splashed with a pattern of red roses. It had belonged to her grandmother, Jocelyn; Lizzie had seen a photograph of her wearing it to her graduation, smiling proudly as she was introduced to the Queen Mother. She had looked like a film star.

Lizzie’s fingers brushed the stiff cotton of the dress. Now, more than ever, she needed the comfort these familiar objects could give her. She closed her eyes. The images came: Her grandmother with her college friends, their excitement and pride as fizzy as the champagne in the glasses in their hands. Jocelyn’s emotions were hers too, the dizzy sense of achievement and the idea of limitless possibilities for the future.

Lizzie felt the customary warmth and reassurance of the emotional connection but this time it was tinged with sadness as well because she also knew the future. She knew her grandmother had given up a promising career as a research scientist to marry and have a family, just as she knew that Jocelyn’s daughter, her mother Annie, had made a terrible, fatal choice in her marriage and had died horribly as a result, running out on a row and crashing her car moments later.

Lizzie put her face in her hands. This gift of hers really was a double-edged sword. She should not depend upon it for it hurt her almost as much as it comforted her. From the present she could look back to a point in the past that was full of bright hope and promise. She could experience the unvarnished happiness of the people she had once known but she also knew what happened next, how those hopes were crushed and joy extinguished.

Tears blocked her throat and she gulped in a breath. She stumbled backwards. Depression unrolled inside her; she was on a knife’s edge, before the plunge. Then, suddenly, she caught sight of herself in the huge, long mirrors inside the wardrobe doors, spotlit by the special bright bulbs she had had installed to illuminate her reflection as though she were onstage. The whole set-up struck her so hard then, the vanity and the superficiality, that she started to laugh instead of crying, slightly hysterically, rolling over on the floor as the tears stung her eyes. She was twenty-six years old and she had people to do everything for her: food, laundry, cleaning... She’d have to learn how to look after herself all over again. But she was resourceful and now that she had her world back in perspective, she was determined. And of course she knew exactly where she could go. The gorgeous cream and red dress had reminded her. She could go to Burford, to the house that had been in her mother’s family for generations and which she had inherited from her mother. Years before, Bill had arranged for the house to be let but Lizzie thought she remembered him complaining a few months back that he hadn’t been able to find new tenants for a while. Probably, she thought, because he would be charging a fortune for the kudos of renting Lizzie Kingdom’s house.