The caretaker’s cottage was the only place where Marnie felt any tiny thread of residual connection to Denise. She could recall moments from her childhood, not specific but flashbacks. As a small girl she’d assumed her mother would always be there, cooking, cleaning, mending, tending to the needs of her daughter and husband. Denise occasionally threatened to leave but Marnie had thought that was part of the maternal role too, nothing to worry about. She saw no reason to panic because her father had been so unconcerned by these threats.

‘And where are you going to go, Den?’ he’d ask fondly from the other side of the kitchen table where he was dismantling some oily piece of carousel motor. ‘How are you going to look after yourself, eh?’ And he’d go round the table and put his arms round his wife, she turning her face from him, trying to keep his dirty hands from her clothes. ‘You’re all right here,’ he’d say. ‘You live your life, you read your books, you don’t have it as bad as you think you do.’

‘I don’t like it here, John,’ Denise said, risking her luck when John was in a good mood. ‘There’s nothing to do, no future in Severn Sands. Can’t we go to the city? I could get a job and—’

‘Oh, don’t start that again,’ John replied. ‘We’d end up in some flea-bitten flat and we’d both have to work all hours to afford it. You don’t need to get a job here. Everything’s taken care of. Don’t you realise how lucky we are?’

But Camille deVillars had been right when she said Severn Sands wasn’t good for Denise. The only times she’d been happy were when she was lost in a book.

‘Go and ask your father,’ she’d say if Marnie asked her for something while she was reading. ‘Go and find him!’ and then, in a different voice, ‘Oh, but you can’t, can you, because he’s not here. He’s where he always is, trailing round after Edward deVillars like a starstruck teenager!’