I dreamed I was a fish, gutted and laid out on ice. When I woke up, the arm I’d been lying on felt stiff and my neck hurt as I tried to raise my head. I didn’t know how long I’d been asleep, but the sun had disappeared, the sea had lost its sheen, and the garden was a gathering of lilacs and blues. Far away, at the bottom of the lawn, there were loops of fairy lights glimmering in the trees, and I could hear little whines and crackles from the loudspeakers as the jazz band began playing “Dream a Little Dream of Me.” I noticed that the door was half-closed, although I’d left it wide open.

It was that, and the thought of Dad, that got me to my feet, despite my pins and needles. I never left him for long—not unless he knew exactly where I was and when I’d be back—and it baffled me that I’d had the heart to do so here, of all places, when he was in such a jangly mood. I recalled my four glasses of wine and closed my eyes. What an idiot. What a day. I made for the door, and with every step my brain seemed to bounce like a loose rock against the insides of my skull.

I forgot about the picture until I reached the front door and took a bleary look back, just to make sure I’d been wrong. Now that the daylight had lost its glare I’d be able to tell for certain that she wasn’t Stella; that the whole thing was a drunken illusion based on hair colour and a slight similarity in the line of the jaw.

There was no picture. I squeezed my eyes shut and opened them wide again, but there was nothing there anymore—nothing at all. All right, there was a faint rectangular patch on the wall, like the memory of something that used to be there, and a light fitting above it—but there was no gold frame and no red-headed woman. I didn’t need to go closer to make sure, but I went anyway. Perhaps she had fallen off her hook and was lying facedown in the shadows? No. The floor was bare. I went right to the back of the hall and spread my palms on the space where Stella’s look-alike had hung. The wall was cold and clammy, and there was a ropy cobweb, thick with dust, that clung to my fingers as I pulled away.

The eating and speechifying had finished by the time I got back to the party, and the band was in full swing. Everyone was standing about on the grass, talking and drinking, and I dodged from group to group in search of Dad. The chatter was more raucous than it had been at dinner, and the air felt sticky with the smell of booze. A few people grabbed my arm and asked if I was feeling better, or tried to fetch me a drink, but I thanked them and shook them off.