Marion Hartley decided that it was time for another cigarette, and paused to crush the butt into the ground. She retrieved another cigarette from her handbag, lit it, and continued.

‘My grandmother was a beautiful and formidable woman, and we loved her and she loved us all fiercely in return. But her love had not been enough where her children were concerned. Her three older daughters lived rather wild and chaotic lives in the City of Kings, and my mother seemed to be content with a rather wild and chaotic life on the farm. My grandmother wanted more for us, her grandchildren. She saw the farm as offering us very limited horizons and wanted us to escape it. I have used this to try to better understand why she did what she did … but I am getting ahead of myself and that is not the way to tell the story.

‘My father went to the City of Kings for work, and a year or so later word reached us that he had married a woman there. Afterwards, everyone said that my mother had died of a broken heart, but what she really did was go to the City of Kings and drink herself into an early grave. My father, upon hearing news of her death, shot himself. That was, I suppose, their way of loving each other till death.’

It was time for yet another cigarette. Marion Hartley trampled the one she had barely smoked underfoot before taking a fresh Madison from her handbag and lighting it. This one she smoked for quite some time, and Spokes began to feel that perhaps that was the end of the story – or, at least, the part she was comfortable telling him.

‘I was an orphan before I was nine years old, but I did not feel it because I had a grandmother and cousins and love all around me,’ Marion Hartley continued. But then my father’s spinster sister, his only surviving sibling, returned from England to be with her parents, who had lost two sons during the Great War and one during peace time. She felt sorry for me and one day decided to take me with her to the City of Kings. She bought me a new dress and new shoes and fussed over me until I was feeling like a little Miss Somebody, I can tell you. We went to La Grange Skating Rink, and I fell in love with the carousel, the candy floss, the chaos – with everything about the place, and especially with the skating rink. The feeling I felt when I first wobbled on its surface was sheer freedom. It was as if I had found a magical kingdom, and, quite naturally, I never wanted to leave it.