She smiles and squeezes his arm. ‘Come anyway. Please.’ She can’t bear the idea of him stuck at the farm with their father. It doesn’t seem fair. It had been his idea to apply to the college; he who visited her in the awful place in Hertfordshire; he who fetched her when the baby had been taken away and she was left, broken and empty; he who broke the news about the baby to their father and stopped him from raging. He bought her the train ticket to London. She thinks now that he hadn’t been joking about Greece.

On the train she can’t read the paper even if she wanted to: her vision is blurred from the pooling, undropped tears and none of the words go in. Out of the window she looks at the flat fields ticking by; each farm building on its own in an empty field reminds her of the cabin. A light drizzle streaks the windows but ahead, a break in the clouds, a thin sliver of light.

On the overhead rack she has put her mother’s old trench coat, and her case. In the handbag beside her on the seat is a letter of recommendation from Miss Cecily Gardiner, schoolmistress. In a large, flat black case next to it is her portfolio: all the paintings and sketches she’s done recently, most of them just from the last lonely months, and in a separate section some of the pictures she’s taken with her mother’s old camera, the one Jack loved. In among the shots of the grounds of the home and the farm, there are some of the girls and their babies. The college probably won’t be interested in those but she’s brought them anyway. It’s a record. In her suitcase, the tiny camera in a case and at the bottom, tucked into the underwear compartment, the broken Zippo lighter, the postcard Jack gave her, and three photographs she will show no one. One is the only photograph of herself she has kept. Many times over the last year she’s taken out the picture and inspected it, trying to find in the gaze of the camera a love that was not there in the pictures of the other women. It was there in the photograph he took of his son. The second is his self-portrait. The wet and the mud have distorted his face but it’s still him. The last of these fragments, these pieces of memory, is a blurry photograph she took of James, the baby she gave away, just a dark smudge of a thing in the awful woollens she knitted.

The train is quiet and in the empty carriage her thoughts are too loud. She applies lipstick as the rows of London terraces come into view.