A mother is dying in hospital in a Scottish town and receiving visits from her two daughters, Ella and Ailsa. It is the first time the daughters have seen each other in several years. Ella tells the story. The conversations she has with her mother and sister bring back memories of her childhood. At first there is a hole in the novel where the father might be. So the reader might surmise that there is no father, that the daughters have never known him. Or a reader might surmise that he is a subject so momentous that he has to be avoided. The reader knows that there is a reason why these women have found it so hard to speak to each other, why Ella has not spoken to either of them for so long. But the reader does not know the precise details. The contrivance is either a realistic imitation of repression or an elegant device to keep the pages turning, with neither interpretation cancelled by the other. The father, we discover, is dead, though he has only been dead for four years, and this is no time at all. Ella still fears sudden phone calls from him in the middle of the night. Death alone seems too slight a thing to have freed them from his dominion, from his violence. Ailsa thinks Ella exaggerates. She doesn’t want to talk about her father. Their mother is dying. What good will it do at this stage to accuse their mother of cowardice, of failing to protect her daughters? Doesn’t Ella think she tried? Why should she have been so much stronger than her daughters? Ella needs to get on with her life. Like you? asks Ella. With the two husbands you’ve had? The ones just like Dad?

I got rid of them, didn’t I? Ailsa yells at Ella. I got rid of them! I stayed here with Mum. Men in this town: that’s what they’re like.

That’s why I left, says Ella. And then she leaves again.

*

While keeping my eye out for Amy I made my way over to Emily, who was surrounded by men and women wearing dark or eccentric clothes. When she saw me she excused herself from a conversation with a man with a floppy fringe, a hooped earring and a cravat – and came over to give me a brief hug.

‘He’s a bit intense,’ she whispered in my ear. ‘A pen pal from a while ago.’

I looked at her in her white dress. ‘You look great. Like you’re getting married.’

She reeled backwards with convincing horror.

The man with the cravat was hovering closer. A woman in a trouser suit shouldered him into the cookery section. ‘Emily,’ she said. ‘Do you know Peter from The Times?’

‘I’ll leave you to it,’ I said, and stepped away and into Andrew.

‘Pushed out of the inner circle too, I see,’ he said.