I was so late back that I missed dinner. I must have looked a sight. I just remember my father telling me off for being late and my mother saying I didn’t look well. I said I didn’t feel well, either, and I wasn’t hungry. My mother was worried. She felt my forehead, said it was a bit hot and she hoped I wasn’t coming down with something. I thought she could smell the sick on my breath and maybe figured I’d been drinking. All I wanted was a bath to wash off the filth of what had happened to me, but we weren’t allowed to run the hot water at that time of evening, so I just went to our room, undressed, brushed my teeth for ages and tried to wash myself as best I could with cold water from the basin. Then I curled up in bed and cried and cried and cried.

I don’t remember when Melanie came to bed. Perhaps I was already asleep. She told me the next day she saw some spots of blood on my knickers which I had just dropped by the bedside. She asked me what happened. I said my period must have come early. That was also why I could get away with not feeling well and being a bit off all the following week. It was common knowledge between Mum and me that I had “difficult” periods, that sometimes the cramps were painful and I became moody and withdrawn. It was the perfect excuse even though I wasn’t due for another week and a half. I wasn’t always as regular as some people—

Linda put down her pen and refilled her wineglass. She had let her cigarette burn down in the ashtray while she wrote, so she lit another. She noticed that her hand was shaking as she did so, perhaps because it had been so tense gripping the pen to write. Dusk was gathering quickly, and the shadows lengthened on the garden, the river itself already dark under the shade of the sheltering trees. A blackbird sang somewhere, louder than the other birds. She knew she was almost finished now and already felt spent, the way she did when she knew she’d got to the end of a particularly difficult poem after weeks of drafts and revisions. She put the cigarette down again and set off on the final words . . .