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distant relative, about to marry, would suddenly remember that Aunt Maude was their great-aunt, or their second cousin, or some such, and in the hopes of receiving a present by return, would send her an invitation.
    With Daisy gone for the evening, Maude felt quite able to enjoy herself in her own special way, taking on her lap the old photograph albums, all that she had left of her innocent youth, of the days before the Great War, when the eldest of her brothers was such a very keen photographer, and they were all made to dress up in fancy clothes, so that he could pose them in all sorts of amusing ways.
    Three of her four brothers had died in the Great War, and with the mix-ups that war brings, none of them were brought home to be buried in the family churchyard at Twistleton, the war memorial by the village crossroads being the only place where their names were recorded, together with their decorations. The last, poor Daisy’s father, had been killed in an aeroplane crash in 1920.
    She’d been the eldest in the family, and her favourite brother had inevitably been the youngest, Roderick.
    Ah, yes, there he was.
    So bonny always, so good, and so sweet-mannered, never a cross word, never a bad temper, he had been special to everyone. No one had wanted him to go to war, the last of the four boys. With two sons already dead, and one still fighting, their mother had done everything to prevent it, but he had gone, if only to prove to everyone that he, too, was a man. And he was killed on his first day – in the last week of the war.
    Of course it was no exaggeration to say that receiving that final telegram had effectively killed their mother.
    She had become like a walking graven image, until finally, in the winter of 1919, she had succumbed to pneumonia. And it had seemed to her only daughter that she had passed away with a sigh of something like contentment, to be buried alongside her husband in the grounds of the Hall.
    So it was that Maude – who had once been the merriest of children, only too willing to dash between one brother and the next, loving to be teased, the first to fall off her pony, or out of a tree, the first to start a bonfire, the first to learn to bicycle, to lead the way with buckets of water and hoses, jostling happily with the firemen, when a wing of the laundry house caught fire – had been left with one surviving brother, Raymond, who had married Daisy’s mother, only for both of them to be killed, not in a motor accident, but in an aeroplane flying to Deauville for the Friday to Monday, details of which she had carefully kept hidden from their surviving daughter, her only niece, Daisy.
    Between the two houses, Twistleton Hall and Twistleton Court, two single women had been left to bring up two little girls. With so much in common, it might have been expected that Maude Beresford and Jessica Valentyne would have had every reason to become firm friends, and yet they had barely been known to speak. It was as if, under the weight of such mutual sorrow, the two of them had been unable to face each other, dreading not the sharing of their burdens, but the doubling of them.
    Maude had a recurring dream of before the Great War. It was always the same. She was in a white dress, ribbons in her long, curly waist-length hair, and she was dashing round a corner, trying to get away from being chased by her brothers. She was always laughing, running ahead of them, before stopping and looking around her, whereupon she would see the landscape devoid of everything, of trees and shrubs, of flowers and fields, and then, turning to remark on it to her brothers, she would find no one there, and only the sound of the wind from the sea, that sea that was always so close, murmuring, threatening, howling, eventually drowning out the sound of the sobs that would finally wake her up.
    She set aside the photograph album, and looked around at her drawing room, with its faded Knole sofas, its large oil