From one of the windows comes a loud noise, like an object crashing against the glass, a stick or something. My nerves startle, but my head, as if detached from all this commotion, revolves around this idea of Margaret’s mother, Thorpe’s mother, taking in her husband’s strays as if they were her own. I consider my own mother, who went about the mechanical duties of motherhood so thoroughly, the cooking of dinners and the enforcing of bedtime, all the while creating the impression of wanting to be elsewhere, wanting something else, someone else.

“Sounds as if your mother had a big heart,” I say.

“She did. She loved us passionately. That was her trouble, I think. She loved too much. She staked everything on people she loved. When they were gone, it destroyed her.”

“And she never knew your father had found the girls again.”

“Apparently not.” From the darkness beside me, Margaret made a noise of mirth. “Just imagine if that lawyer in Paris had sent his letter to Papa a week earlier. Or if the generals hadn’t sent them into battle on the first of July.”

“Then Ursula Kassmeyer wouldn’t exist. I mean she wouldn’t exist where she is now, helping Benedict escape.”

“Yes. That’s irony, I suppose. Or is it coincidence? Sometimes I can’t properly tell the difference.”

“Maybe it’s the hand of God,” I say. “Maybe it’s hope.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Lulu. You can’t possibly think there’s a God anymore. That he gives a damn about the world, even if he exists.”

The last few words are buried beneath the noise of another gust striking the windows, the rattle and shriek, and in its wake there doesn’t seem to be any point in talking. Why talk when the weather just eats up everything you say? But after this gust comes silence, a full minute or two in which the wind goes flat and the windows lie still, and you can hear yourself think, and you forget the possibility of annihilation.

“Tell me a story,” I say. “A fairy tale.”

“I don’t know any of those.”

“Yes, you do. Somebody read them to you when you were little.”

“Oh, Mummy read stories, all right, and they were all frightful, gory tales, in High German. They didn’t end well.”

I listen to the thud of my heart inside my chest. “My mama used to read from the Arabian Nights. I used to imagine I had a djinn of my own, hiding in a lamp somewhere, and all I had to do was to find him. I used to rub every lamp I saw, hoping he would turn up and grant me my wishes.”

“Well, there’s the difference between you and me, I suppose. You’ve got hope left in you.”