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flying ‘t’ strokes and the circles above the ‘i’s, made Laura catch her breath, but they all had foreign stamps and pre-dated Dizzy’s leaving home. She pulled one out of its envelope, then thrust it back unread, reluctant to fall again under the spell of her sister’s charm. It was just too painful. She’d been given those breathless, ungrammatical effusions to read at the time and they could have nothing new to tell her. Anyway, they were worn with constant reading; her mother must have combed them again and again for clues which weren’t there. Laura sighed. The lawyers could have these too.
    Her own letters, with their American stamps, she dumped unceremoniously in a black plastic bin-bag. She had no wish to come face to face with that younger Laura either, bubbling with enthusiasm about her new husband, her new country, her new life. All of them, now, consigned to the mental bin-bag which holds discarded dreams.
    Bleakly she climbed the stairs to her mother’s bedroom. This, with its intimate evidence of an interrupted life, would be the hardest part; the perfume she always wore, Estée Lauder’s White Linen, still hung on the air and a choking lump came to Laura’s throat. She wouldn’t give way to the disabling tears, though, busying herself with collecting, tidying, slowly obliterating the personal so that strangers should not paw over her mother’s life.
    She hesitated over the clothes – expensive, some of them almost new – and wondered whether her mother would have wished them to be given to friends. But then, of course, that would open up a whole ‘who-got-what’ can of worms; Laura seized them ruthlessly and put them into the bags. It would be a good haul for a charity shop.
    Jewellery: that could go to the lawyers too, meantime. Furniture: her eyes lingered on the bow-fronted Regency chest, the pretty Venetian mirror. The house was full of beautiful things her parents had collected over the years, but she had decided it must be sold and with that decision had effectively rendered herself homeless, so they had better go too. She would have nowhere to put them until she found herself somewhere to live and she had no idea as yet where that would be – the country, probably, though definitely not here where she would be haunted by memories round every corner. The problem was that without roots or constraints it was hard to know where to start looking.
    She had been very tired when she had finished and it was late, but at least the most painful tasks were behind her now and she could look to the future. She went to sleep considering a half-formed idea that perhaps she might rent somewhere in London for a bit, look up a few old friends while she worked out her next step.
    By lunchtime the following day the tentative plan had become an imperative. She’d had visits from four of her mother’s friends, three offering affectionate support and the fourth, the long-nosed Mrs Martin, offering ‘help’ in disposing of her mother’s wardrobe (‘I know how distressing these things can be for the family, dear’) and proving unable to conceal her disappointment at being told that it had been dealt with already.
    The phone went all day with offers of hospitality as well as business calls from lawyers and accountants. Laura had collapsed again into bed, even more exhausted than she had felt the day before, with a priority list on her bedside table headed ‘Find Flat’.
    This morning had started in just the same way (‘Now Laura, my dear, I want you to come to lunch on Sunday. My grandson’s popping down from London – such a nice boy, doing so well with KPMG. I’m sure you’d have a lot in common and I simply won’t take no for an answer . . .’) and by the end of the fourth call Laura was feeling persecuted.
    She eyed the phone with loathing as it rang for the fifth time, had a brief wrestle with her conscience, then picked it up. She found it hard to keep the terseness out of her voice.