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many of which made her shiver even now. She sometimes felt that the walls were impregnated with them, or with her feelings. Were all houses like that: haunted not only by what had happened in them but by what people had
felt
in them? Did tears and anguish and arguments stay there, for ever, absorbed into the very fabric of the place? Well, she thought, Rowena’s put paid to that. When she considered the possibility of living somewhere else, part of what she felt was guilt at leaving behind her all her past selves, every Eva she’d been since she first came here.
    Old people were generally supposed to be bad sleepers. For the first time in my life, she thought, no one is surprised when I tell them how much of the night I spend reading or listening to the radio. She’d never slept well. As a girl, she used to read novels under the blankets by the light of a torch. Agnes Conway would have been shocked if Eva had turned the light on and left it burning half the night. She’d have felt personally responsible if she’d known that her adopted daughter suffered from insomnia. She’d have assumed that the fault was hers, that she must have done something wrong.
    1938
    Eva was four years old when she arrived in England on a dark, cold December afternoon. She stood in the village hall with a few other children and wrinkled her nose at the smell of damp clothes and old wood. She had a small suitcase at her feet and all around her huge adults moved about, speaking a language she didn’t understand. She’d stopped crying hours before, realizing that tears wouldn’t help her. Nothing could change what she’d done. It must have been something dreadful, or why would she be here by herself? Being here must be her punishment. Whenever she thought about her sister, a freezing terror seized her and her mind wrenched itself away from Angelika and concentrated on these people – who were they? What would happen to her while she was here?
    A lady came up and spoke to her. Eva couldn’t understand what she was saying but she heard ‘Agnes Conway’ said over and over again and realized that it was the woman’s name. She wasn’t pretty like Mama, but she had a kind face and a brown coat. The woman looked at Eva and took her hand and led her out of the hall and to a small house. They’d had to walk quite a long way down a dark street. When they came to the house and the woman opened the door, it dawned on Eva for the first time that this was now where she would live. She burst into tears on the doorstep and she went on crying all through supper. At bedtime, she was still hiccupping from the tears she’d shed, and wondered if she’d go on crying all night long, but at last, she fell asleep.
    When she was young, Eva had long red hair which hung in a plait down her back. The red had turned to grey some time ago, to which she had added ash-blonde highlights, and now she put up her hair during the day, but at night she plaited it again, just as she’d done as a child. Agnes was kind to me, Eva reflected. She did her best and looked after me as well as she could.
    The darkness didn’t frighten Eva. When they’d first moved into Salix House, in the days before the work had been done and it was still nothing but the shell of a building, she used to imagine the night settling over the house like the folds of a soft, dark blue blanket. Now she moved through the rooms, liking the silence and noticing, as she had almost stopped doing, the high ceilings, the wide windows, the way the stairs from the ground floor curved up from the square hall to where the bedrooms were on the first floor, arranged along three sides of the house. The banisters became a kind of gallery. Eva smiled at the thought of how Dee and Bridie loved sitting there, peering down at the hall through the bars outside their room whenever guests came to dinner or a party.
    She glanced at her dressing table, checking that all was well with the mirror. It looked safe enough: