My Mother's Shadow: The gripping novel about a mother's shocking secret that changed everything

by Nikola Scott

Genres: Women's Fiction

Synopsis

Addie thinks she knows everything about her mother. But when a stranger appears claiming to be her sister, she realises that her life so far has been a lie. But why? 'Intriguing, twisting... I loved it' Dinah Jefferies. 'A gripping family mystery told in lush, evocative prose' Erin Kelly. 'A well-written, intriguing read full of family secrets... Brilliant' Fabulous A NO. 1 BESTSELLER IN NORWAY A BESTSELLER IN ISRAEL Perfect for fans of BEFORE WE WERE YOURS by Lisa Wingate. Hartland House has always been a faithful keeper of secrets... 1958. Sent to beautiful Hartland to be sheltered from her mother's illness, Liz spends the summer with the wealthy Shaw family. They treat Liz as one of their own, but their influence could be dangerous... Now. Addie believes she knows everything about her mother Elizabeth and their difficult relationship until her recent death. When a stranger appears claiming to be Addie's sister, she is stunned. Is everything she's been told about her early life a lie? How can you find the truth about the past if the one person who could tell you is gone? Addie must go back to that golden summer her mother never spoke of...and the one night that changed a young girl's life for ever. 'A compelling family story... Beautifully written and evokes vivid pictures of an English summer in the 1950s' Sheila O'Flanagan. 'Trembles with family secrets' Victoria Fox What readers are saying about My Mother's Shadow: 'One of the most enthralling, heartbreaking books that I have read in quite some time ' Goodreads reviewer, 5 stars 'The poignant storyline is deeply affecting. Definitely a book that is going to stay with me for a long time ' Goodreads reviewer, 5 stars 'So beautifully written. In places it made me laugh out loud and in other places it made me cry. Poignant ' Amazon reviewer, 5 stars 'I was hooked from beginning to end! Vivid characters and evocative scenes make this an enchanting read ' Amazon reviewer, 5 stars ' Stunning and emotional ' Amazon reviewer, 5 stars 'This novel absolutely blew me away! I was left emotional and teary. It had me gripped from the start and is loaded with scenes that pull at the heartstrings! I cannot recommend this novel enough ' Goodreads reviewer, 5 stars 'A stunning read and I can't wait to read more from this author' Goodreads reviewer, 5 stars

Release date: May 30, 2017

Publisher: Headline

Print pages: 368

Sample

There are many things this house has seen and many secrets it has heard, whispered things in the night that drift on the breeze and curl around chimneys and slate-covered gables, mullioned windows and white pebbled paths, wind their way through roses and rhododendrons and the trees of the old Hartland orchard. Loves found and lost, the pain of unexpected death and the deliciousness of forbidden trysts. Midnight tears and laughter in summer nights, all the dreams to be dreamed and all the worlds to be found. The house has kept them, without question, without judgement, preserving them in the shadows of its walls.

And these days, life at Hartland is rife with memories. The war, and the death it brought, is still fresh in everyone’s minds. It’s not been so very long, after all, since England came out of the bleak years of rationing, bombed-out houses and Nissen huts, blinking against the unexpected onslaught of new luxuries and sweets in the sweet shop and jangly new music everywhere. But the future is bright now, and so it’s little wonder that they grasp at life with both hands, these young people of 1958, that this country house summer has made them all a little giddy with the promise of having it all.

Or maybe it’s the moon that has made people giddy tonight, the way it hangs in the sky as if pinned there, low above the stables and bursting full with a strange orange light. You only need to look at it, you only need to taste the champagne prickling against the roof of your mouth and smell the heady scent from the rose garden, and you’ll feel a pull at the bottom of your stomach, a reckless moon-madness that speaks of endless possibilities, of making the world your own. Lanterns are strung up all around, waving and twinkling in the evening breeze like so many coloured fireflies, and ‘Magic Moments’ is crooning around the couples swaying and laughing and smoking, perched on the low walls of the terrace with gimlets and lemonade to cool flushed cheeks. One of the girls hired to help for the evening stops to watch as she tops up the lemonade pitchers and punchbowls, sets out a new platter with puff pastry squares, marvelling at these golden young men and women who seem to have no care in the world other than to celebrate a seventeenth birthday, to cheer on a young girl’s entrance into adulthood.

Two people are missing, though, two have slipped away from the terrace, made their way past a croquet mallet lying forgotten among the rhododendrons, down garden paths and through the trees, hands across mouths to hold back laughter and the occasional gasp as a stray branch hits the backs of bare legs. One is the birthday girl, seventeen today, who has in her short life already known too much heartbreak and for whom much worse is still to come. But tonight the girl has shed all her worries and fears, and she knows, deep down, that life can never ever be as deliciously forbidden, as wonderfully new as this summer night. So yes, she, too, is grasping at life with both hands, and who can blame her, holding on to the hand of a man who’s been smiling at her for days, lazy, bemused smiles with drops of seawater clinging to his lashes, wide innocent grins when others were watching, and secret, promising eyes when they had a brief moment alone in the Hartland rose garden. She can’t see the smile in his eyes tonight, only moonlight and firefly lanterns, but she can feel him close to her, so close that his skin is warm against her arm and the smell of him mingles with that of freshly mown grass and the darker, more mysterious night smells of a garden unwilling to be disturbed, even for a first love as urgent as this one. Here, among the trees in the orchard, the air is cooler and involuntarily the girl shivers, and that’s when he slips his arms around her and gathers her close, tips her face up with his other hand, and in this one single moment, life is perfect.

But already, and the house knows this, trouble is in the air, and the golden facade of this perfect summer, the glow of the heady, fragrant night, is about to be tainted. The house has always been a faithful keeper of all its secrets, and so it won’t now give away what lies ahead. Instead, it takes the fleeting memories of a girl’s first love, to keep them safe forever.

Death is a funny thing. Not funny funny, obviously, and really not funny at all, but strange. By rights, it should come with a bang, announcing its cataclysmic blow with machine gun harbingers of doom; instead it sneaks up like a thief, waiting for a too-eager foot stepping out into a traffic light or that single rebellious cell in our bodies that suddenly decides to start its devastating multiplication. Death always watches, biding its time until it strikes, and when it does, nothing will ever be the same.

Given the disproportionate awfulness of death, I don’t remember much at all about the day my mother was hit by a lorry. Disjointed little bits, maybe, like the absurd amount of glass the lorry had showered across Gower Street and my father’s pinched face as we waited for the taxi that would take us to her body; my sister Venetia arguing with the policewoman who, surely, had made a mistake, and was no one doing their jobs properly anymore?

The one thing I do remember, very clearly, was the moment I was told about it, because it was in this moment – I was standing in front of the dairy fridge holding sixty-five eggs for the day’s meringues – that all the tears I might have cried vanished, and my eyes suddenly and inexplicably dried up. And dry they remained, through weeks filled with coroner’s statements and my mother’s favourite Countess roses on her coffin and making sure my father got up each morning over at the big, now-empty house on Rose Hill Road; all throughout, I never once shed a tear.

Some people simply don’t cry very much, so this in itself was perhaps not a true measure of one’s grieving abilities, but I had never been one of those people. On the contrary, I used to be particularly good at crying, in fact, it was one of the things I excelled at. When I was little, I cried so often and so readily that my mother claimed my body had to be made up of two-thirds salt water. My very own vale of tears, she said. I cried over molars accidentally flushed down the sink and white spots at the back of my throat, I worried about what lurked in my wardrobe and under my bed and at the bottom of the swimming pool. I followed stray cats and collected baby birds that had fallen out of their nests and wrestled with their fates for days.

For heaven’s sake, Addie, my mother would say and push a handkerchief my way, twitching impatiently when my eyes got big and shiny and my throat was working to swallow back those sobs that were so weak and futile when one should be strong, square one’s shoulders, get on with things. Buck up, darling. Look at Venetia, four years younger and you don’t see her cry. I must have been an immensely exasperating child, because so many things about me brought forth that twitch on my mother’s face, a sort of lifting of one cheek and compressing of her lips into small, white folds, that I’d started hiding when I saw it coming, mostly in the downstairs loo, which was always warm and smelled of Mrs Baxter’s lavender cleaner and was rarely visited by anyone. Years later, after I’d moved out and bought my own apartment, one of the things I loved most about it was the absence of a downstairs loo.

And now, when my old nemesis, my private vale of tears, actually had a chance to shine, in a perverse twist of fate, it had gone and the most I was able to procure was a choked sobbing, swallowing convulsively to dislodge a strange lump that seemed to have got itself permanently stuck, like a fat little troll, at the bottom of my throat. It wasn’t that I didn’t miss her. Of course, I did. Who in this sad world doesn’t miss their mother when she’s gone? But the more Venetia mourned, as a golden child does, by losing weight and turning wan and shadowy, the more mutinously dry my own insides became. This worried me a great deal, until it occurred to me that maybe I was actually doing exactly what my mother had always wanted me to, being strong and squaring my shoulders. Were my eyes staying heroically dry from some deeply ingrained impulse to ward off the white-lip mouth-twitch, nurtured through forty fractious years with my mother? Was somewhere deep inside me a little girl smiling, because all the way into the grave, her mother would finally be pleased?

Venetia, who expected me to pay appropriate homage to our mother, was inevitably disappointed by what I produced instead. Newly pregnant and dangerously volatile, she swanned in and out of Rose Hill Road with homeopathic remedies, shop-bought chicken soup and lots of unnecessary advice. I tried to stay out of her way as much as I could, because while she held centre stage with her pregnancy and her bereavement counsellor, my father had gone very quiet in the side wing.

The one time he broke down, about two weeks after the funeral, was completely unspectacular in that he simply didn’t get out of bed. Finally, on day four, when his bedroom door was still closed at five in the afternoon, my brother Jas and I took him to the doctor and then the hospital, from where he emerged a week later almost eerily calm. With some relief, my siblings went back to their own grief and respective careers and impending families, but I lingered, unnerved by the look in my dad’s eyes. It was hard to believe that this was the same person who’d taught me chess when I was ten, who’d re-enacted the Allied landing with a stapler, two pencils and a hole punch when I needed help with my history homework and who was always game to get a flashlight and study those white spots at the back of my throat. It’s not a tumour, Adele, I’m sure of it. It’s germs fighting a battle with your body and, open wider, just a bit wider, yes, I think your antibodies are currently in the lead. Here, maybe a Polo mint will help.

Now, more often than not, we exchanged polite news of our week over tea or stared out silently at my mother’s garden wilting in the back, and the chessboard hadn’t seen the light of day for ages. Sometimes, I had to resist the urge to pinch him, very hard, just to make sure that he hadn’t also died and left his body behind to get up and go to work and return for cups of tea, the cold dregs of which he left all around the house to be collected by Mrs Baxter, who came in four mornings a week to keep an eye on things. Still, I was hoping that maybe one day soon he’d be waiting for me, holding two cups of tea, throat-scaldingly hot, the way we both liked it, his face creased in a smile. Addie! There you are. How about a game of chess with your old father? So I continued coming to see him, making my way across North London after work, at first through too-bright summer dusks and then autumn evenings and eventually sharp and wintry nights that turned once more into a beautiful London spring, ticking off the twelve months after my mother’s death by the way the bark changed on the trees on Hampstead Heath and the shadows of the little supermarket outside the Tube station had lengthened when I rounded the corner towards my parents’ house.

Long before Venetia had started throwing about ideas for how to mark The Day of her Death, I’d started to dread it. But the calendar that hung in the patisserie kitchen had a big red splat on the corner of 15 May, raspberry sauce I think, which seemed to grow in size whenever I looked up from decorating Mrs Saunders’ birthday cake with seventy-five pale pink fondant roses, forcing down the swallows that rose up my oesophagus like sluggish bubbles on a pond.

Venetia had wanted to get some of the family together – Jas and Mrs Baxter, my father’s brother Fred, and a variety of other family flotsam who lived in the vicinity, to ‘draw solace from each other’s company’, and ‘let this day go by amongst close family’, which, according to her bereavement counsellor, would be an important step towards Stage Five in the grieving process. Rather over-optimistic, in my opinion, because my father had barely progressed past ‘Denial’ yet and even though I generally tended to go along with things, especially where Venetia was concerned, this time I did try to argue. Being in our big, bright kitchen where my mother was so conspicuously absent was not remotely the way I wanted to spend the day, and I was fairly certain my father didn’t either. Venetia overrode all objections, however, made me swap shifts, ordered an indecently large box of pastries from the patisserie and made sure I left on time to deliver it to Rose Hill Road.

And now I was here. The door gave its usual soft groan as I stepped into the front hall and involuntarily I held my breath. But it was very quiet, the grandfather clock ticking in the corner as it always did, and it smelled the way it always had, like books and dust and Mrs Baxter’s lavender cleaner, even though this time last year my mother had died. To my right, jackets hung on the ancient coat stand in the corner and several umbrellas dripped onto the stone floor tiles, indicating that the family had come together only a short while ago.

Silently, I crept across the front hall, eyeing the light that spilled through the door to the downstairs kitchen. A subdued mumble floated up, then a laugh, quickly stifled into a discreet cough. Uncle Fred, I thought, my father’s brother, who lived in Cambridge with his three dogs and a collection of rusty cars he was forever fixing up. I strained my ears hopefully for answering sounds from my dad, but his deep, slightly hoarse voice couldn’t be made out amidst the low thrum of conversation. He’d been working more than ever lately, and from what I could tell, his heartburn had got a lot worse. I hoped he’d gone to the doctor yesterday like he was supposed to. There was another mumbled question. Jas, probably, who must have come straight from the hospital in his rush to do Venetia’s bidding.

I dug my toes into the sisal matting at the thought of them all draped around the big kitchen table. Venetia’s bereavement counsellor had said to leave our mother’s chair empty, as a sign of respect. I hated the bereavement counsellor, who was a cadaverous-looking man called Hamish McGree, and I hated the thought of that resolutely empty chair, with its curved armrests and straight back and the jauntily chequered wedge that my mother had stuck under the lining to help her bad back. I tried to remember when I last saw her sitting there, looking at her garden, her expression faraway in contemplation of the day’s to-dos or frowning as she scanned the newspaper headlines. But I couldn’t. Her face remained blurry and unfocussed, and all I could see were little bits of her: her hands, long-fingered and slightly tapered like mine, or the strands of her hair falling forward as she bent to blow on her coffee, which she had liked tepid, almost white with milk. It’d been like this all through the year. As people around me recalled funny moments and entire conversations and whole afternoons spent in her company, I was still working on simply remembering her face, the way she’d put on her lipstick in the morning, the twitch of her mouth when she was impatient and the tight set of her shoulders at night when she was cold and looking around for her scarf. It was a shrapnel rain of memory fragments that my mind seemed to be expecting me to put together when my ability to remember her was stuck in the same barren place that my tears had disappeared to, a dried-up riverbed of disabled grief, where memories were barrelling along like tumbleweed, never connecting, never whole and, somehow, rarely good.

More subdued laughter, turned discreetly into a cough, and, just like that, I realised that there was no way I was going to walk down those stairs, to that empty chair and the blurry echo of my mother’s face. Backing away from the kitchen stairs, I dumped the cake box onto the hall table with a squishy thud and shot, sodden jacket, bag and all, through a door on the right where I sagged against the wall and, for a long moment, simply stood, savouring the cool darkness against my pupils after a long day staring at the raspberry splotch on 15 May. The ticking of the grandfather clock was louder here, because its back was against the wall, but it thudded in a comforting sort of way, like a heartbeat, and finally I exhaled and opened my eyes, pushing down a twinge of fear at my own daring. Venetia would be livid.

My mother’s study. I hadn’t been in here for a long time, not since Venetia and I had come and gingerly poked through the desk for her address book to do the death announcement cards, practically exiting at a run. Every now and then, Mrs Baxter would suggest having a clear-out, but every time Venetia dismissed the idea out of hand, so the room had remained exactly the same as the morning my mother had left to teach her popular seminar on ‘Emerging Creative Outlets for Women Writers’ for the last time. Books and folders and papers were lined up neatly along the shelves, post-its daring only occasionally to stick up here and there, pens stood ramrod straight in an old mug that was too good to throw away, as if they were waiting for my mother, who liked her pencils straight and sharp and ready to go. There was her telephone, the old mustard-coloured kind that still used a rotary dial, and her roll-top desk hulking against the wall, with drawers and cubby-holes and gadgets we’d made her for Christmases and birthdays because we knew that she liked things orderly and put away.

She’d been in here every evening, a sliver of her visible through the half-open door as she worked on lecture notes, student essays or manuscripts or, more mundanely, read the newspaper. She read that paper with an almost religious fervour, every single night, whether we were asleep or awake, in bed with chickenpox or out on the town. Sometimes, watching her unfold it to cover the entire desk, I wished that she’d look at me, or at the very least at the burglar in my wardrobe, with half the focussed attention she gave the small advertisements in the back and the obituaries and the robber held at a police station in Leeds. But things between my mother and me had been difficult. It was mainly my fault, really, because I was too soft, always had been. I didn’t put myself into life’s driver’s seat, I didn’t square my shoulders enough. My mother wasn’t soft and she wasn’t weak, she was like a hard, shiny gem, and however much we both tried, my soft, desperate-to-please self and her brilliant one could not but rub each other the wrong way, all the time, relentlessly, like stroking a cat against the grain, like golden vanilla custard splitting into a curdled mess. That’s how things had been, between my mother and me.

I’m not sure how long I stood there, on the threshold of her space, breathing in the faint echo of books and determination that had been the very essence of my mother, waiting for tears and wishing for at least one small good memory of her, because today, of all days, I should remember her face, I should remember her, properly and whole.

Obviously, something had to happen, and something did.

The phone rang.

The sound was so odd inside the gloom of the study that it was like hearing a siren underwater. For a second I froze. Too soon, it rang again, and when I heard the echo of the main unit in the hallway, I dived towards the desk and snatched up the receiver.

‘Yes?’ I whispered, looking nervously at the door. I’d very much prefer not to be found skulking in the darkness of my mother’s study while I was supposed to be helping with the mourning downstairs.

‘Mrs Harington?’

I’d been pressing the handset hard against my ear and the voice on the other end arrowed straight into the left side of my brain. Suppressing a small scream, I wrenched it away and the mustard-coloured receiver clattered onto the surface of the desk.

‘Mrs Harington? Are you there?’ the phone squawked. It was a man, speaking in a slow and gravelly way. Reflexively, I opened my mouth even though Mrs Harington, well, she wasn’t exactly – here.

‘I’m sorry, yes, what was that?’ I said hesitantly into the phone, looking at the door again and clearing my throat.

‘I know you prefer not to be contacted here,’ the voice on the other end said, ‘but you haven’t been answering your mobile these last few weeks. I wonder, is it turned off? Nothing’s come in for a long time, so as per your request I’ve not been in touch. But then, out of the blue, I got a rather interesting letter, which I’d like to get to you soon, and since you asked me not to send anything without prior warning . . .’

Mrs Harington is not here. Tell him, Addie.

‘A letter?’ I said to the stranger who was calling my dead mother on the telephone.

‘I’m not sure about this one, because it could well turn out to be yet another dead end, but . . .’ He stopped for a second and, instinctively, I leaned towards his voice. ‘The connection isn’t terribly good, I’m afraid, so do excuse the brevity, but you’ll get the letter soon. In any case, on the fourteenth of February,’ the line crackled, ‘there seems to have been—’

The fourteenth of February? I frowned and opened my mouth to ask the most obvious question, but just then, there was another noise. The telltale squeak of the kitchen door, then footsteps on the stairs.

‘Excuse me,’ I whispered into the phone, ‘I have to go. I’m so sorry. I’ll call you,’ I added for good measure.

I hung up just as I realised that I didn’t, actually, have this person’s number or his name. Nor did I know anything about what he wanted. And had he really said ‘the fourteenth of February’? That was strange because . . . but what would he know about 14 February? And, come to think of it, who was he? I frowned at the phone, forgetting the dry sting behind my eyes and the troll-like lump in my throat. Mrs Baxter might know. I’d have to ask her.

Voices in the hallway. Shoes scuffling across the tiles, heels clacking into the loo and back out, the front door groaning.

‘I’ll see you soon, then.’ Jas’s voice came through the wall. ‘Uncle Fred, I’ll give you a lift to the station, shall I? I have to pop back to the hospital.’

‘I have no idea where Addie is. She said she was going to be here.’ Hoarseness blunted Venetia’s sharp voice but there was a distinct edge to it, and in my hiding place, my hand still touching the mustard-coloured phone, I cringed, thinking of the inevitable moment when she would come to find me.

After some shuffling back and forth, silence fell at last and I strained to listen. Maybe Venetia had gone too, leaving the kitchen for someone else to clean up, and I could slip out, find the cake box and Mrs Baxter and my father. We’d had Biscuit Roulé as a special today and I’d made five of the fluffiest sponge cake rolls, scented with vanilla and studded with tangy, ruby-red raspberries. I’d added some to the cake box because at the end of a long and trying day, there was nothing better than a cup of Mrs Baxter’s golden Oolong and a rolled-up cream-filled slice of Biscuit Roulé heaven.

My black Whistles tote was on the floor, and my jacket, which I’d dropped onto the small armchair when the phone rang, had slipped onto the floor, scattering a couple of coins across the carpet, small pockets of mess in the otherwise tidy room. Quickly, I knelt to scoop them up and was just about to straighten when my eye caught something below the desk. All the way at the back, tucked neatly between the legs of the desk, the clasp occasionally catching a random ray of light, was my mother’s handbag.

I looked at it for a moment, then, before I could change my mind, I stuck out my hand and eased it forward. Graphite grey and elegantly sturdy, it was a vintage Hermès bag; well, it was vintage now anyway even if it hadn’t been when she’d got it back in the early seventies. She’d bought it with the money from her first ever award, something about contemporaries of Jane Austen who, apparently, had been much more successful at the time but were now largely forgotten. I stroked the side of the handbag, feeling the leather ripple underneath my fingertips. I had no idea what it was doing here, but then again, where else would it be? My father still slept on the right side of the bed with her pillow and blanket made up next to him, her book splayed open by the foot of her lamp. Venetia, despite being brisk about life in general and my many shortcomings in particular, was so erratic about our mother that she would have liked to wrap the entire study in cling film to preserve it for eternity. So we’d left my mother’s gardening gloves hanging over the side of the bucket, permanently moulded to the shapes of her hands, and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, swollen with dried moisture, behind the U-bend of the sink in the upstairs bathroom; we’d left her coat on the coat stand in the front hall and her shampoo in the shower. Someone should write a letter of complaint to Hamish McGree.

I set the bag onto the desk. If we ever did get around to clearing out her things, then Venetia would probably take the Hermès bag. She and my mother had shared the same simple, understated chic; they’d both loved being beautiful and all the small luxuries that brightened one’s day. Venetia always unerringly knew what to give my mother for birthdays, and my mother always unerringly loved what Venetia had given her. Watching her unwrap my dad’s thoughtful gift and Venetia’s stylish one, I would sit on my hands to resist the impulse to hide my own laboriously selected and agonised-over present because I knew it wouldn’t be nearly as perfect or as beautiful as the cashmere shawl that Venetia had got her for chilly evenings.

Oddly enough, my mother and I actually looked a lot more alike than Venetia and she did. We were both small and compact with a high-maintenance cloud of dark curls and slightly slanted grey eyes, set wide apart over a small nose. But being a pastry chef meant bulky aprons and hairnets, scarred hands and clothes that were always sticky with fondant and blueberry pie filling. My mother had taken meticulous care of her clothes, because she hadn’t had much money when she was young, and even though I’d tried to clean myself up before I came home from school and then later, when I came over for lunch on a Sunday, inevitably she’d discover a stray dusting of flour on my back or a rip in my sleeve and would frown at my carelessness.

But the Hermès bag was a rare exception. When we went to buy it, Venetia had fallen asleep in her buggy on the way, so it was me who helped line up all the contenders on the worktop, who pointed out the compartments inside that allowed her to keep things organised, who was smart enough to think that the grey would be more practical than the light beige. Soon after, Venetia had started walking and talking and doing all sorts of amazing things, and by the time I was ten and she six, she had firmly and effortlessly claimed my mother for herself. And my mum, who was always so impatient with me and seemed to have to spend an inordinate amount of energy getting me to square my shoulders and stop shilly-shallying, very readily gravitated to Venetia, who was quick and sure and confident. It took me a while to realise and then to accept this fact, and only a little bit longer to stop trying to measure up to my clever sister, as she went on to become an architect with her own small firm north of Regent’s Park. And when Jas, who was born with a stethoscope in his hands and bucket-loads of determination, turned out to be the youngest ever hand surgeon in the London metropolitan area, I stopped vying with my siblings altogether and settled down to my own modest life as a pastry cook at a small patisserie start-up in Kensington. All the world open to her and what does she choose to be? A baker, I overheard my mother say to my father more than once and I eventually stopped bringing cake and sweets and breads home for Sunday lunches, figuring they could only ever be reminders of a mediocre career that had fallen far short of her expectations.

I hesitated for a second before lifting up the Hermès bag, feeling the solid heft of the leather against my shoulder, the straps hugging my arm. My mother had bought other bags after this one, but she always kept coming back to the Hermès. It reminds me of how far I’ve come, she’d said once, and whenever I saw it hanging off her arm I felt a small ridiculous twinge of happiness, irrationally convinced that the one afternoon of choosing it with her made me complicit in its wearing and in how far she’d come. For some reason, I was loath for the bag to go to Venetia. I should just ask her—

Sudden footsteps and a loud hrmph of annoyance heralded Venetia’s imminent arrival. It was in this moment, the split second before the door to the study opened, that for some unfathomable reason I decided to hide my mother’s handbag from my sister. Swinging it around my back, I snatched up my jacket to cover it.

‘Adele.’

Venetia was eyeing me through black horn-rimmed glasses. Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail and, with the exception of a perfectly round bump that looked like she’d stuck a large basketball underneath her expensive maternity dress, she looked so thin and hollow-eyed that I felt a squirm of guilt at having left her in the lurch. I shifted the Hermès bag further behind my back, fumble