I do not tell any of them of the looks we receive, the asking after our husbands. How do they let you travel unaccompanied, they ask us? They assume Anne is a widow because of her black clothes and she does not correct them, despite calling herself Miss. I ask her if it wouldn’t be easier to call herself Mrs Lister and have done with it, and I could be Mrs Fraser and wear black too and they can assume we are two wealthy widows with a desire to get away from the rest of our lives in mourning – but she’ll have none of it. She introduces us as Miss Lister and Miss Walker, her companion, before I can say differently. Sometimes when she leaves me as I am too tired to venture out, I am left alone with someone who will talk to me, perhaps a kindly lady who speaks some English, I explain that we were both engaged and that our fiancés died, so we are almost like widows and sought company in our shared loss. They sympathise, pat my hand and pay for more tea. I like this fiction that people can understand and accept us for. I just want to be accepted. I like the sympathy, the connection, but Anne would hate it if she found out.

Miss Lister

We are outsiders to everyone else in the world because of something we cannot help: love. I had thought to love was just between two people, but as time passes, I realise our love alone is not enough. If we must hide, are seen as shameful by those who are supposed to love us too, our love is diminished, made to feel wrong when it should feel right. How can we not live openly? If I chose to marry a woman then why could it not have been in the eyes of God in a church, surrounded by our family and friends who would have been pleased for us and blessed our union and accepted us for who we are: two women who love each other? How can there be shame in that? We cause no one else any harm but are harmed ourselves by it. If only I could have been like the other women I fell for, most of them able to love either sex and so able to fall to normality, to conform. But that would be a lie, an endless torment, to deny myself who I am, and to what end? To make others feel more comfortable in my presence? To make everyone else feel that the supposed natural order is intact?