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of will she calmed herself. She was tired, excited, her nerves were strung out; she couldn’t possibly have anticipated any of this. She just had to remember this was a great opportunity. Something totally radical and beyond her experience.
    But when she opened the living-room door, her resolve vanished again. She didn’t manage more than two steps inside. Why hadn’t Stephen told her about the flowers? All of the dead flowers. The sloping pile of brown stalks and shrivelled petals that rose from the carpet to the sill of the big window overlooking Lowndes Square. They reminded her of flowers on old graves, left to wither and collapse and to bleach of colour. Seeing so many emaciated stems and dead leaves in the thin, brownish light made a shiver pinprick up her spine and then fizzle at the base of her skull. This must have been going on for years. This pile built one bunch at a time. And all roses, by the look of the few petals on the top that remained as dark as wine. Behind them, the grey drapes with the plaited golden trim were drawn closed.
    She turned the main light on to better investigate the flowers and see the pictures on the walls, but the room was still so shadowy and dim she realized she’d be better off with the drapes open. But when she leant over the flowers and tried to pull them apart she discovered they had been stitched shut. She stepped back quickly from the window and stared at the neat bindings of red thread that joined the drapes in the middle, permanently.
    ‘What the fuck?’
    Alone and crazy, Great-aunt Lillian had sewn her drapes shut with thread, and then mounted before them floral tributes that covered half the room. She turned around to look about her. The room was empty of furniture, the floor still thick with dust, but the corners where the walls met the ceiling were free of cobwebs, so you still could see the photographs. On all of the walls, black-and-white photographs in antique frames reached from the height of her waist to the ceiling. And the pictures all featured the same couple. Every single one of them.
    Handsome with a pencil moustache, like Douglas Fairbanks Junior, his hair slick either side of a parting, she saw her great-uncle Reginald for the first time in her life.
    His eyes were dark and intelligent. And smiling. Just looking at him made her grin. Reginald always dressed in a suit and tie or wore silver slacks with a white shirt open at the neck. In one photo a little terrier lay at his feet as he sat in a cane chair. A pipe often featured in his strong left hand. Lillian’s husband: a man she always stood proudly beside, close, either holding his elbow or standing behind him with a hand placed upon his shoulder. Like she couldn’t let him go. Like she loved the man so much being without him would drive her crazy.
    And Lillian had been a beautiful woman. Like a movie star from the forties with big brown eyes and the sharp bone structure you rarely saw these days. Always dressed elegantly in tea frocks, or cocktail dresses to the knee, or ball gowns sweeping around the white toes of her glossy shoes. But it was the way they looked at each other that affected her most. You couldn’t fake that. This sad, brown and mildewed space which Lillian roamed and dreamed in and haunted for sixty years suddenly made more sense. Two people once lived here who should never have parted. And the place was in mourning because the widow was heartbroken. Maybe mad with a grief that never eased. Did hearts still get broken like that?
    Apryl knew Reginald died in the late forties. After serving in the RAF in the war and surviving dangers she couldn’t even begin to comprehend, this happy, handsome man with a beautiful young bride had died suddenly. She didn’t know the details, but her gran had told her mom that he died after the war. That’s all they had to go on. A sketchy oral history passed down from one solitary old woman to another, and so on to her. But glimpses into Lillian’s