“I sometimes think I was soaking up the details on purpose. I remember so clearly the last time I saw Daddy. He had to leave early for the station, to go back to the front, and I was supposed to be asleep. But the sun rises so early in June, you know. I looked out the window and saw them in the drive, Mummy and Daddy. It was only half past four, and he helped Mummy climb into our old Wolseley—she was expecting Benedict, she was just enormous with him—and then he got into the driver’s seat. He was wearing his uniform, no overcoat. I remember wishing he would take off his hat so I could see his hair. He had the most wonderful hair. It was much redder than Benedict’s, like flame.” She tosses the cigarette in the water. “And that was it. They drove away. The telegram arrived a week later.”

“It was the Somme, wasn’t it?”

“Yes. The very first day. One of his captains went down in the first surge, and most of the lieutenants, so he picked up his rifle and led the company himself. He was a major, a career officer. So he knew, you see. He knew what war was about.” A wave of drizzle comes across the meadow. She squints angrily at the sky. “Come along. There’s a place we can shelter.”

I’d like to tell her that I don’t want to shelter, that I welcome the hardship of a cold rain, but she’s already tramping onward. The ground’s begun to slope, the bare trees to gather. I smell the river before I see it, a giant, teeming perfume of freshness and rot. The branches part, and there it is, about a quarter mile across, brown and rambunctious with rainfall. Inside the shelter of the trees, the larks sing earnestly. It’s December, after all, and no time for fun and games.

“That’s where my mother drowned herself,” Margaret says. She lifts her arm and points to a ruined building, choked with vines, on a small island connected to the riverbank by a footbridge. “It was November, a few months after Benedict was born. She would feed him and put him to bed and then come here, in the middle of the night. And one night she just went down those steps and didn’t come back. I woke up to this terrible fuss. Benedict was screaming for milk, and the maids were crying, and all these men were tramping over our lawn. Granny had taken charge, she was giving people orders left and right. I saw them carrying Mummy into the ambulance. She died in hospital a few hours later. They wouldn’t let me see her, the disgrace was too awful. And she couldn’t be buried in consecrated ground, so they had to bury her on the estate.”

“Where?”