Mills’ hand reached out and touched Helen’s arm. Mills nodded at Helen’s hand and Helen noticed the red pinpricks of blood on her forearm where she had begun scratching absent-mindedly. The scratch marks on her right wrist had only just scabbed over. Older scars on her arms were pale, ghostly memories of a past imprinted on her skin. Her fingertips still strayed towards those scars now and then, a braille history to remind her of those years after she left home, of the punishment she had inflicted on herself.

Helen willed herself to stop scratching, chewing, pulling at herself, but her fingers twitched in frustration. They wanted to scratch away the skin, down to the bones, to feel the snap and sear of pain, to punish herself over and over.

She sighed and smiled absently at Mills, put her hands in her lap under the table and forced herself to focus on the conversation in the air, but she felt like she was smiling maniacally while shit rained down around her and she wanted to run screaming from the room.

Diana was sitting at the other end of the table to Hugh’s left. Helen watched her, her full lips smiling at Lydia, her long fingers gripping her knife, the deep red nails perfectly manicured to sharp points. Helen watched as she raised her fork to her mouth, parted her lips and bit a small piece of potato from the prongs. Helen’s eyes tracked up her face and she realised with a jolt that Diana was now looking directly at her.

Diana chewed calmly, a slight smile on her lips, then put down her fork and said, without taking her eyes off Helen, “Tell me about how you and Helen met, Hugh.”

When did she start calling him Hugh?

“I walked into the bookshop in the village one day, looking for a book on Lee Harvey Oswald for a class I was teaching on 1960s American history. Behind the counter was an extremely pretty woman who had her nose buried deep in Wuthering Heights. So taken by the book was she that she didn’t even look up and I felt awful interrupting her to enquire about the book I was looking for. But needs must and I grabbed the bull by the horns, as it were, and ploughed straight ahead with my query. She didn’t have the book, but ordered it in and I made an excuse to go back to the shop every day for a week under the pretence of seeing if the book had arrived, but actually just to see her. I was like a dog with a bone, I tell you.” He chuckled, proud of himself.

He had certainly been persistent, Helen would give him that. Their courtship, as it were, was more a case of him wearing her down rather than sweeping her off her feet. There was nothing chest-heaving about their relationship, even back then in the early days.