Strange, how we’d parted so brusquely, when mutual reassurance had been the tone of the last few days—“You’re sure you don’t mind my going?” “I’m absolutely sure.” “Because if you want me to stay . . . ?” “I just want you to have a wonderful time,” etc. I wished we could make our goodbyes all over again, in that kindlier spirit.

I don’t know what Dad thought of my trip. I’d told him a fraction of the story, so it can’t be said I lied. He knew I was staying in a guest house near Byrne Hall, and that I had my reasons. The reasons—in his view—were entirely to do with Stella. “Making peace with the past,” I’d called it at one point, and he’d seemed satisfied with that, although it made me feel oddly guilty, as if I were presenting the whole enterprise as simpler and purer than it was. What would a truer explanation sound like, though? How was I supposed to make him understand, when he was pottering about the kitchen the day before my departure, with one ear on me and one on the cricket commentary?

Northanger Abbey was at the top of my bag. I took it out and laid it on the table without opening it. I’d packed the exhibition catalogue as well, meaning to read Tom’s essay during the journey, but I didn’t want to anymore. My notebooks were right at the bottom, and I thought about digging them out, too, but there was no point trying to write on a train. It was too public. The woman opposite was turning the pages of the London Globe, and I could see the Contents column down the right-hand side of the front page, with Dad’s name squished up inside her pudgy fingers. Page 13. Robert Lyell. I looked out of the window and wondered if Tom had read it yet. Perhaps I should text him. I reached into my pocket and fingered my phone before laying my empty hands on the table and watching the warehouses flit past, and the apartment blocks, and the banks of scrub and willow herb.

I picked up my phone again. Perhaps I should text Dad and say a proper goodbye? Or perhaps I should just stop making so much of this trip to Byrne Hall. After all, there was no reason to think it would lead to anything. It wasn’t a quest, for heaven’s sake. If I were to accept, like Dad, that my main—or most concrete, or sane, or explicable—motive was Stella, it boiled down to a polite enquiry for the people at the big house. “Did you happen to know my sister?” I’d ask, and they’d give me some banal reply, and the whole thing would be over in two minutes flat. I might be on my way home again by this time tomorrow.

The train slowed, though we were nowhere near our first stop. We trundled past a vast cemetery, which put me in mind of the churchyard on the other side of the city where my mother and sister were buried side by side.