She passed it to me with only the smallest of hesitations, which seemed to cement my indebtedness to her more than to demonstrate any attachment to the gown on her part. Its broderie was impossibly soft, as if it had been worn and washed and handled a thousand times, though it had probably only been used once, eighty years ago, when the vicar splashed my grandmother’s head in the font, and my mother had not even been imagined. I carried it down the hall and up to my bedroom, hearing the sewing machine fire up behind me as she settled to her task. I wondered if she had ever watched my grandmother sew, ever sat spellbound while the needle rose and fell; and I knew that I would never ask.

Lying back down on my sickbed, I examined the gown in more detail. It had little puffed sleeves, pintucks at the waist, and one mother-of-pearl button the size of an apple pip at the nape of the neck. The skirt fell long, far too long, with a starchy stiffness to it, and a hem of lace pointed like a row of incipient fangs.

My mother came upstairs an hour later with the finished dress in her arms. It had looked very small to her, she said, so she’d let the seams out after all.

PATIENCE

Claire arrived at the agency to find Patience already in the waiting area. With her hands folded in her lap and a plastic suitcase on the laminate by her feet, she looked like a travelling salesman or a wartime evacuee, someone thrown on the mercy of others. The receptionist stamped the paperwork and said, ‘She’s all yours.’

Patience stood up.

‘Am I meant to shake your hand,’ Claire said, ‘or is that not the right thing? Have you been here long? I couldn’t get away from work, and then the roundabout was closed.’

‘Do not worry,’ Patience replied, with a sweet and stupid expression on her face, ‘I have been happy sitting here, watching the world go by,’ even though the view through the agency’s front windows was of a deserted self-storage facility.

Claire steered Patience out to the car and settled her in the passenger seat, with the suitcase on her lap. Patience made no comment about the car’s cloudy paintwork; she said nothing as it clunked into gear or rounded corners too fast, and Claire wondered grimly how her mother would respond to an unflusterable presence like this.

‘Tell me about your mother,’ Patience said, as if she could hear what Claire was thinking. It was a sensible guess, a simple question, but Claire was momentarily silenced by it.

‘I did that enormous interview,’ she said. ‘I filled in that enormous questionnaire. She’s still what she is.’

‘So she is still difficult. Can you tell me about a difficulty she has presented in the last few days?’