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well, she adopted me and brought me to England with her.’
    â€˜Didn’t you have a dad?’
    â€˜He died. This was during the war, you know. The Second World War. An awful lot of people didn’t survive. Rosemary’s husband died too, and she married again after we arrived in England. A lawyer called Frederick Barrington. He was my stepfather and I went to work for him straight from school.’
    â€˜But what about your real mother? Can you really not remember her?’
    â€˜No, I do remember certain things about her, of course. She was French, though you’d never have known it, and she never spoke about her childhood, as I recall. We spoke English at home. If she had a foreign accent, I didn’t notice it. She was very pretty. Her hair was like – well, like gold.’
    Grandad must have had tears in his eyes, Lou thought. I didn’t realize what they were because he took out a hankie and wiped his eyes and he did that a lot, for all sorts of reasons. I never asked him her surname, she thought. He must have changed the subject. Dadwill know what happened to her; how she died and what her name was. I’ll ask him. How awful if she were totally forgotten!
    Lou found that she was crying and she wasn’t sure who exactly the tears were for. Perhaps, she thought, they’re for me, because I feel hurt at what Constance has done. I can see now how much she must have disliked me.
    Stop crying, she told herself. Pull yourself together. She was a wicked old woman who never got over the fact that I loved Grandad and was rude to her as a child. She’s never forgiven me for that night. Anyone else would have put it down as a childish tantrum, but not her, oh, no. Lou could see that this one occasion, more than fifteen years ago, had marked their relationship for ever and that Constance had made up her mind that night and never changed her opinion.
    Nessa and Justin hadn’t been at home. Nessa was at university in Bristol and Justin still at his expensive boarding school, paid for by Constance of course. Mum and Dad needed to be somewhere or other and Lou was sent to stay at Milthorpe House for a few days. She could still remember packing her little case; how happy she’d been to think that for once she’d be the one who was going to be fussed over. Justin was an attention-magnet and when he was there, Constance circled him as if he were a candle and she a dizzy moth. It didn’t matter to Lou because Grandad was always happy to talk to her. Constance, on the other hand, usually reduced her to a sullen silence within minutes. She wasn’t what Lou thought a granny should be. She was too well dressed, too pretty, even though she was quite old. You couldn’t imagine cuddling her. She made Lou feel large and clumsy and hideous and tongue-tied.
    On the first night of that visit, she waited in bed for Grandad to come and kiss her goodnight. When her grandmother came instead, Lou was astonished to see her. Constance sat down on the end of the bed and said, ‘Are you ready to go to sleep, dear? I’ve come to tuck you up and kiss you goodnight.’
    â€˜I want Grandad,’ Lou had said.
    â€˜Well, you’ve got me.’ Constance smiled. ‘So sorry.’
    Lou recalled in every detail the ferocity of the tantrum that followed. She’d screamed and yelled and shouted that she wouldn’t go to sleep ever, ever if Constance kissed her and why didn’t she goaway and never come back and she wanted her grandad and wouldn’t go to sleep till he came – on and on, beating her pillow with her fists, and sobbing and ending up with the child’s litany of I
hate you I hate you I hate you.
    Constance had left the room of course, but not before she’d stood up and looked down at Lou.
    â€˜The feeling,’ she’d said, her voice full of contempt, her eyes freezing blue, ‘is entirely mutual.’
    Then she’d left