“Yes. She was perfectly lovely. I used to think of her as an angel. She was always calm, always patient. She never raised her voice with me, not once. I always had the feeling . . . but then, I was only nine when she died.”

“What feeling?”

Margaret idles the stem of the wineglass in her fingers. It’s nearly empty, and the bottle’s nearly empty, and I’m tempted to open another. But oh, she’s balancing right there on the edge, and the slightest breath might topple her. We are sealed tight in this chilly room, in this chilly flat, windows blacked out, curtains closed, single bulb burning.

“I don’t know. That she held some kind of deep sadness inside her. Some terrible loss. She was only ever really happy when Daddy was around.”

“They were very much in love?”

Margaret raises her head, and the softness of her expression shocks me. I see her mother on the riverbank in her halo of blondness, and for the first time I wonder who stood behind that camera, taking the photograph. “I was only nine,” she says, “but I’ll never forget the way she looked at him, and he at her. It was more than love. It was something spiritual, like a religion.”

“What a comfort for you.”

“A comfort?”

“Knowing that such a love even existed in the world. Knowing your parents had it.”

Margaret lifts the bottle and turns it almost vertical above her glass, so that not a single precious drop remains inside. Together we watch the drip, drip, drip, the shimmering of the surface, until there’s nothing left to give, no more wine outside Margaret’s glass, and she sets the empty bottle at the edge of the table.

“Why do think I never married?” she says.

When the dishes are washed and put away in the cupboard, Margaret turns to me and folds her arms, as if she’s considering what to do with me. We’re standing in the cramped little kitchen, on the floor of gray linoleum; there’s a window above the sink, but it’s tiny and blacked out, and the air’s still rank with the odor of cooked meat and grease.

“You didn’t let me finish about B—,” she says.

“I didn’t realize there was more.”

“He was quite obviously trying to sound me out, to find out what I knew. Lucky I’ve got a straight face.” She taps her fingers against her arm. “He said nothing about you. He said it was terrible news about Thorpe, and I said yes, jolly awful, was there anything at all we could do? And he said they would alert any active agents in G section, any informants, to stand ready to offer aid and so on. All that rubbish.”

“You don’t believe him?”