“May I help you?” the lady at the front desk asked.

D’Arcy fumbled in her handbag for a tissue, which she dabbed to her nose. “Excuse me,” she said in a thin voice. “I’d hoped to be able to get through this without tears but it’s become a struggle to get through even an hour without crying.”

The receptionist stepped out from behind the desk and offered her a box of tissues, from which D’Arcy gratefully extracted a handful. “Please, sit down,” the woman said, ushering D’Arcy to a chair.

Once D’Arcy was seated, she began. “It’s my mother. She…” D’Arcy had planned to pause here for another dab of the tissue onto her face but she felt a real tear leak from the corner of each eye. Then she told the lie. “My mother recently…died.”

The woman mumbled something sympathetic and volunteered to find D’Arcy a glass of water.

D’Arcy shook her head. Then she began to tell the lady about her mother, Victorine Hallworth, who attended the boarding school from a young age and who had been unexpectedly taken from D’Arcy’s life. “We were estranged, you see,” D’Arcy said, her voice strangled with the fear of this ever happening, but how could it not given what Victorine had most likely hidden from her? “Now I can see that everything I thought about her was wrong.” Another truth amidst the lies. “I have to make it up to her, or I think I might go mad. Do you understand?”

The woman nodded, clearly far from understanding where this was all going.

“I’ve been trying to gather as much information about my mother as I can; I want to get to know her properly at last. I want to start at the beginning of her life, from when she was a child, and I hoped that perhaps the school might have records of her time here and that you might let me look over them. It would mean the world to me.”

D’Arcy wasn’t sure if her tale was convincing, or her tears, but she found herself being ushered into a quiet meeting room, a couple of folders placed before her, and then she was left in peace to read about her mother’s life. She opened the first folder.

On top was a letter, dated early November 1944. It was an inquiry about whether a place could be found at the boarding school for a little girl called Victorine Hallworth. The writer explained that he was fighting with the American army and that he wanted to be sure his daughter would be looked after while he carried out his duties. The name typed at the bottom was, of course, Dan Hallworth. Unarguable proof that the famous photograph of the man embracing the little girl was a photograph of D’Arcy’s mother and grandfather.

D’Arcy pushed the folder away. Why was she doing this to herself? She didn’t need to know any of this. She’d been perfectly happy, her mother had been perfectly happy, until now. There was no point in ruining that happiness for a search into a past that had happened so long ago it no longer mattered. But what if it did matter? What if D’Arcy wanted a grandfather?