When she was younger, a gauche, blundering thing in knee-high socks, her mother had gone away for the weekend. It was not long after the war. No one said where, or why. When she came back, Mrs Timms told her that her mother was sick. She stayed in bed. Verity stood outside the closed door and she could hear her mother crying. If only she’d gone in then, but she was afraid. Once she heard her father talking about neurosis and excessive grief. Eventually, her mother emerged from the bedroom and there were parties, teas, visitors again. But perhaps she had already disappeared. They had not been enough, her and Peter, to keep her from slipping into a state of distraction. And in the end, she’d left them, absolutely. No one knew if she’d meant to drown in the sea, or if it had been an accident, but it would always feel like an abandonment.

*

Their mother’s birthday fell just after Christmas and still deep in winter. There’d been precious little festivities at the farm. As usual, they listened to the Christmas Day broadcast from Sandringham, but it was the new queen this year. She’d sounded so young, not much older than Peter was. ‘Pray for me,’ she’d said, and he thought it sounded like a cry for help. She talked of the Empire as a ‘power for good’ and their father had nodded along emphatically, but it seemed to Peter, with the Americans on their doorstep, that the old order was disintegrating.

Before breakfast and long before dawn, instead of returning to the house after milking the cows, Peter walked down Leafy Lane and across the Holkham Road to the chapel where Mother was buried. He didn’t really know why. They didn’t celebrate her birthday any more, certainly nothing had been said on the first birthday after her death.

On the grave was her name and the dates. Loving wife and mother. But was that true? It’s just what people asked the stonemason to write. There were no flowers, it was the wrong time of year, but it looked so bald and bare. He should have brought something.

The graveyard was deserted. He began to talk, not aloud, there was no need. He spoke to the headstone and the bones six feet down in the cold earth.