At home, she stopped looking at the dressing table mirror for fear of what she would see. Her mother’s face seemed to shimmer on the glass, watching her. She heard unidentified female voices. Poor motherless child. Look at her. What would her poor, dead mother think? She wandered into her mother’s bedroom, kept pristine by Mrs Timms. She opened the wardrobe door. The empty white folds of her mother’s wedding dress, hanging. Her fingers reached out and touched the silk but she took her hand away quickly as if stung. She closed the door and sat with her back to the wardrobe. Marriage. Babies. This was what her mother had wanted for her. Verity was no longer sure if it was true. In Verity’s memory, her mother left an impression of gliding, of perfect, gilded beauty. She had not been the kind of mother you talked to. And now she was gone and she could never ask, Were you happy? What did it all mean to you? Her parents’ marriage had been arranged, as marriages used to be. She’d been offered up, like a prize heifer, with farm attached, her father the lucky one, back from the Great War, in a country of few young men. The silky folds of the wedding dress, as creamy as the raw milk from the cows, hung as a warning of a life planned out and enclosed. It was meant to be every girl’s dream – like the debs in their white gowns lined up for plucking by some suitable aristocrat. But it was not her dream. Her father said it was what her mother had wanted for her but that stultifying life had destroyed her. The photographs were the only signs of herself she’d left behind. Had they been her mother’s attempt at some kind of autonomous life? Once, lying next to her mother on top of the quilt as she slept her dreamless, drugged sleep, Verity had taken hold of her thin, white, jewelled hand. ‘Wake up,’ she’d said, and had fervently wished that her mother would wake up, hold her and the two of them would tell each other their secrets.