Then Clio’s heart sank. Yet more that she wasn’t telling her mother, and it felt wrong. It was new to her, this keeping secrets business, and she didn’t like it one bit, even though she knew it was the right thing to do.

That much had become clear on the day of her father’s funeral. The last of the guests had left and the Hall, having been teeming with well-wishers all saying kind things, suddenly felt very quiet. Deathly quiet, Clio had thought, half-smiling at her own inappropriate pun. She had been smiling all day and her cheeks ached with it. In fact, she had been so busy smiling at all those kind words that she had quite forgotten to cry, and as a result the day had turned out to be far less difficult than she had anticipated.

Hector had taken himself off to his own apartment as the last guests left, and Clio had assumed that she would do the same, but now she found herself just hanging around the main part of the Hall. She didn’t feel quite ready to be by herself. She needed company, not necessarily to talk, but just to be.

What she really wanted was to be with her father. Part of her hoped that he would sense this somehow, and grace her with a visitation of sorts. Didn’t people say that that often happened – a butterfly in January, a single white dove, a rainbow? She had even visited his music room, reasoning that this would be the most likely place for him to reappear in some guise or other, but to no avail. He had kept away which, in the light of recent revelations, now felt horribly ironic, for had he not been ‘away’ for half her childhood?

A clip-clop of heels across the parquet floors announced the approach of someone.

‘Mummy?’ called Clio into the darkness.

She never called her mother this, having considered it infantile when she was at school and now just saccharine-fake, but at this moment it felt right. She was a little girl who was lost in a world that she didn’t quite understand, and the only person who could help her find her way back to safety was her mummy.

‘Clio, darling,’ replied her mother as she came into the light. She was still wearing her black silk dress but now had a fluffy, over-sized cardigan in a delicate pink over the top, so she might have been dressed for any day rather than the day she had buried her husband. ‘What are you doing there all on your own? Can I get you anything? Something to eat, or a cup of tea?’

Clio shook her head. ‘No, thank you. I just wanted . . .’ she hesitated. What did she want? ‘I just wanted to be with someone.’