Myrtle watches, and her features fall slack. ‘I wish,’ she says raggedly. ‘I wish I could just’ve been your sister, Pearl. I think I would’ve been much better at that.’

CHAPTER 24

It is the silence that wounds her.

No pattering feet, no half-whistled tunes. Cedric’s hoop and stick stand propped up against the old grandfather clock, which still refuses to tick. Even the magpies have ceased their chatter on the roof. The whole house holds its breath.

Mamma raises the trumpet to her ear. For once, it is not her hearing that is at fault.

‘Why should Cedric be with Simon?’ she asks for the third time this morning. ‘He was perfectly well here with us.’

‘You know why, Mamma. He is a Carfax.’

‘He is not.’

The perquisite of grief is that it dulls all other emotions, even the temper. Agnes finds she can lie to her mother again and again, without the slightest compunction. She will keep saying Cedric is staying at Simon’s house until the police return him. And they will return him. If she repeats it often enough, she may even believe it herself.

‘According to the baptismal records and the law of this land, Cedric is Simon’s son.’

Mamma snorts. ‘That may be so. But the child was to live with us, after the separation. We agreed to it.’

‘And he has. Now he is almost a man. He needs an occupation and an education. Simon will provide him with both.’

Mamma lowers the ear trumpet, unsatisfied with its message. ‘What I don’t understand,’ she mutters, ‘is why my grandson would go away without saying goodbye to me. And he didn’t even take his books with him!’

‘Because he is not far away,’ Agnes says to herself. ‘He will be back soon.’

How dull the parlour feels without him; cluttered and poorly kept, occupied only by a spinster and a widow. Rather than providing a place to rest, it offers a crushing weight of banality.

Agnes remembers leaving the police station, and how Sergeant Redmayne watched her departure with an altered manner. No doubt Simon told him the whole sorry story to gain his assistance: how she lost her father and supported the family; how the man she loved jilted her; how her sister died in the Accident; how she nearly succumbed to pneumonia two years ago.

A failing business, two scrapes with death and a legacy of fragile health. Even the police would pity a person with this history.

Agnes finds it difficult not to pity herself.

‘I am going upstairs to work,’ she announces.

Mamma mumbles something incoherent and stares into the fire.