The Girl in the Painting

by Renita D'Silva

Genres: Family Life; Historical Fiction; Literary Fiction; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

India, 1926: English Margaret arrives with her new husband Suraj at his family home, set amidst beautiful rolling hills, the air filled with the soft scent of spices and hibiscus flowers. Margaret is unwelcome, homesick and lonely, but her maid Archana, a young woman from an impoverished family, reminds her of her long-lost sister, a tiny glimpse of home in a faraway place. As Margaret and Archana spend more time together, an unexpected friendship blooms. But in British India the divide between rich and poor, English and Indian, is wide, and the clash between Margaret’s modern views and the weight of tradition on Archana will lead to devastating results ... England, 2000: When Emma’s grandmother gives her a mysterious painting and asks her to take a message of forgiveness to an old friend in India, Emma is relieved to have some time and space to make a decision about her future. But as she fulfills her grandmother’s wish, a secret kept for over 70 years is finally revealed – the story of a day spent painting by a stream full of water lilies, where a betrayal tore three lives apart forever ... Discover the extraordinary secret of the girl in the painting, perfect for fans of Kathryn Hughes, Lucinda Riley and The Storyteller’s Secret.

Release date: April 11, 2019

Publisher: Bookouture

Print pages: 498

Sample

Margaret sits in the arbour in the grounds of what was once her childhood home and is now a hospice, waiting for her granddaughter to arrive. She has a feeling Emma will visit today, and over the years she has learned to trust her feelings.

She is sitting in the same spot – although a different bench, this one hardy metal, not glossy walnut lovingly polished by Albert – where her mother had once perched almost a century ago, looking at the angel that has borne witness to and survived so much. It is faded now, its white marble dingy yellow, and yet still bearing testament to her brother’s brief life. It centres her.

She has touched the base of the angel, felt the markings there like she used to as a young child – how naive she was then, so happily innocent of all that was to come – lovingly tracing her brother’s name etched into the smooth stone.

As always when she’s here, the icy caress of snow-sprinkled air on her wizened cheeks, the angel constant, she marvels at the serendipitous miracle that has enabled her to spend the twilight of her life at the place that is caretaker of her happiest memories.

She has come full circle.

There’s exquisite comfort in coming to terms with her life in the place where it started.

She feels so close to them here, her loved ones, knowing they are waiting, separated only by the ethereal curtain that cloisters this world from the next. Now she understands that during her long life, despite at times having felt bereft, solitary, she never was alone – they had been watching over her, looking out for her. The thought of reuniting with them, including, in particular, the love of her life, brings in equal parts joy and longing.

‘Not long now,’ she whispers.

But before she goes, there’s something she must do.

She fingers the envelope in the pocket of her dress, put there when she woke this morning, knowing with absolute conviction that Emma would come. The official wording on the deeds, yellow with age, crackling with importance; the letter scented with nostalgia, memories of a land once loved, never forgotten.

She closes her eyes and pictures the house: wide and sprawling, tinted copper as if sprouted from dust.

She pictures her granddaughter’s slender hands pushing open the ornate wooden door, stepping where she had once…

She thinks of the painting that was created beside the stream, swollen water glimmering starburst silver, the opposite bank dotted with saris singing in kaleidoscopic colour as they dried on rocks, the spiced grit taste of humid heat, cinnamon tea and companionship.

The painting of a girl, stark sadness in her eyes.

Margaret will give the envelope to her beautiful granddaughter and say, ‘These are the deeds to my house in India.’

She will navigate Emma’s surprise, field her granddaughter’s questions with the imperiousness that is the prerogative of great age.

She will hand Emma the painting, conceived beside a babbling brook pregnant with rain, and she will ask her granddaughter for one last wish – the final request of a dying woman.

‘Please,’ she will say. ‘Go to India. There’s a woman I’d like you to find. Archana. She and I… It’s a long story.’ Margaret will close her eyes, everything that happened flashing briefly before tightly shut lids, spawning moisture tangy with regret and ache.

‘When you do find Archana,’ she will continue when she is able to speak, ‘give her this painting. Tell her… tell her that I understand why she did what she did, that I forgave her for it a long time ago. Ask her, please, to forgive me.’

‘…twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty. Here I come!’ Margaret opens her eyes and looks about the grounds. The world is a bright, joyful green, scented with summer: grass and nectar.

Robins sing, pigeons peck at worms, squirrels nibble at acorns and magpies admire their shimmering reflection in the water of the fountain. Her sisters, however, are nowhere to be seen.

Albert is hacking away at the rose bushes with his pruning shears, a riot of colourful petals festooning his feet. He is mumbling to himself as he works.

He does that a lot. Margaret, perpetually curious, had once tasked him about it.

‘Oh, never you worry your pretty little head, Miss. Tis between me and the plants, it is.’

‘Does talking to them help?’ she’d queried, wide-eyed.

He’d laughed, a throaty chuckle that morphed into a phlegmy cough, so she moved backwards ever so slightly just in case her new dress, lavender silk tulle with white lace flowers, got spattered.

‘Go on, Miss, off with you.’ Waving Margaret away and turning to his beloved plants, his hands quite brown, encrusted with mud that had settled in the grooves of his skin.

The air tastes golden, a hint of smoke overlaid with lavender. A giggle wafts from the house on a burst of honeyed breeze – maids gossiping as they go about their chores. Sheets billow, puffed-up ghost selves of their owners – it’s wash day; Peggy will be wearing a scowl, her face a thundering storm, her hands chafed pink and peeling from all the scrubbing.

‘Does it hurt?’ Margaret had made the mistake of asking, staring at Peggy’s palms, like the fat slabs of ham that Father likes in his sandwiches, in horrified wonder.

‘What do you think?’ Peggy had growled.

‘You’re too curious for your own good, Meg,’ her sisters admonish her. ‘It’ll get you into trouble, if you’re not careful.’

‘But how else do I find out things?’ she asked.

‘Do you have to know about everything?’ Her oldest sister, Evie, smiling fondly.

‘Of course! How can you not want to know?’

Perhaps when Peggy’s not looking they can play the tent game with the washing, Margaret thinks; if she can find her sisters, that is. This hide and seek is getting tedious – she always ends up seeker. It’s not fair.

Margaret scrunches up her eyes in concentration, her gaze flitting this way and that like the yellow and black striped furry bees alighting on the flowers, spoilt for choice. Try as she might, she cannot spot her sisters. But she will find them.

She lifts up the skirt of her dress and runs past the fountain spewing greenish-white diamond-speckled water. Past the folly, a quick look inside: no, they’re not in there.

Into the copse of fruit trees, plum and cherry, apple and pear. The vinegar green scent of ripening fruit. Chirping birds.

Of her sisters, no sign. She plucks a cherry. Spits it out. Red but not ripe. Deceptive. She wants rid of the bitter taste in her mouth.

And then, her eyes adjusting. Behind the apple trees. A flash of silver. Evie’s wheelchair sticking out of the copse.

‘Ha! Found you.’

It’s always a wonder to Margaret how her sister manages to hide herself so neatly despite the wheelchair. It’s a cumbersome contraption and yet Evie never complains, despite not being able to join in with Margaret and Winnie in most of their games, content to sit and watch. It is also why they end up playing hide and seek so often, for it is one of the games Evie can play, Albert helping her to her hiding place.

‘Why are you always in that chair? Why can’t you walk and run, like us?’ Margaret had asked when she was just beginning to make sense of the world around her.

‘Meggie, you can’t—’ Winnie had admonished but Evie had interrupted her with, ‘I had a disease called polio when I was younger than you. It made my legs weak, look…’

Evie had pulled off the blanket that always covered her legs and lifted her skirt, and Margaret had burst into tears at the sight of the twisted twigs that passed for her sister’s legs.

Now, Evie grins. ‘Took you long enough. Where’s Winnie, then?’ And, seeing Margaret’s face, ‘I’ll help you?’

Despite the wheelchair Evie has a knack for divining hiding places, no matter how intricate, which is why she is rarely seeker.

‘I’ll find her myself.’

‘Do you have to be so stubborn, Meg?’

Margaret bites her lower lip, determined. She might be the youngest but that does not mean she needs help.

She runs past the vegetable garden, cabbages and cauliflower, carrots and potatoes dug up by Albert and waiting to be collected, and into the walled section that her sisters call ‘the secret garden’.

A butterfly, brilliant yellow, flits among the roses; a burst of sunshine in the foliage.

Something catches the corner of Margaret’s eye. A gleam of inky violet clashing with the rainbow-hued flowers.

‘You shouldn’t have worn your favourite dress, Winnie,’ she says, laughing, as she hauls her sister out from behind the waterfall of blooms.

‘Oh, Meg—’ Winnie begins but then stops, cocking her ear.

Nurse’s voice, faint but distinct, carrying across the garden so Albert stretches and squints towards the house, one palm shielding his eyes. ‘Miss Evie, Miss Winnie, Miss Meg, you’re to come in for tea.’

‘Not already, surely? I wanted to play the tent game among the sheets,’ Margaret complains.

‘Come along now.’ Winnie good-naturedly tucks her arm through Margaret’s.

‘You smell like a rose bush.’ Margaret scrunches up her nose and Winnie giggles. It’s the sweetest sound – tinkling water and pealing bells – and Margaret can’t help but join in.

She falls in step beside Winnie, pushing Evie’s wheelchair between them, a rhythm perfected through practice.

Evie, Margaret’s gentle eldest sister, is patient and knowing, answering all of her questions, holding the skipping rope, uncomplaining – both about Margaret’s demands and about the fact that she can’t take part herself – while Margaret perfects her leapfrogging antics.

Winnie, Margaret’s middle sister, is sweet and soft-hearted, quick to tears. She has adopted all the rats in the scullery, so traps for them have to be laid in secret, and carcasses hidden from Miss Winnie – for everyone loves her and they would go to any lengths to protect her.

Winnie has also named the rabbits that devour Albert’s plants, and keeps some as pets, much to his disgust.

‘Nuisances,’ he harrumphs, shooing them off but not daring to do much else, for fear of making Winnie cry.

Winnie begs scraps off Cook – who refuses, of course. Cook is a termagant, her pies as wonderful, her desserts as sweet as she is sour. When no scraps are forthcoming from Cook or the kitchen staff (who are all more afraid of incurring Cook’s wrath than about upsetting Winnie), she saves food off her own plate for her pets.

‘Look at the state of you!’ Nurse tuts when she sees them. ‘I’ve a job to make you presentable. Your father expects you in the orangery at four o’clock sharp.’

‘Father is here?’ Margaret asks. Father very rarely joins them for tea, unless it’s one of their birthdays.

‘Yes.’ Nurse smiles, secrets glinting in her eyes. ‘I think he and your mother have something to tell you.’

‘What is—’ Margaret, always impatient, begins.

‘You’ll find out soon enough, Miss Meg. Upstairs with you and Miss Winnie. Miss Evie, I’ll help you up.’

Mother and Father are seated at the long table in the orangery when Margaret skips downstairs after Winnie, Evie carried down to her wheelchair by Nurse, all of them scrubbed clean and shiny.

Tea is laid out, formally, something they don’t do when Father is not around. They sit at the kitchen table instead, with the warm scent of baking, Cook bustling around them while simultaneously bossing her staff.

Mother beams indulgently as they sit opposite her and Father. She is glowing, Margaret notices.

The table is laden with cucumber and egg sandwiches, vanilla sponge and custard tarts.

‘Good afternoon, girls,’ their father says and Margaret’s attention focuses on him. He is smiling widely, his moustache gleaming with well-being.

‘Mother, Father, what is it you want to tell us?’ Margaret asks, not having, unlike her sisters, the reticence to keep her mouth shut when she wants to know something.

‘There’s a time and place for everything, Meg,’ Mother likes to say when Margaret speaks out of turn. ‘Sometimes, no matter how pressing the need to know something, you have to wait for the right time to ask, or not ask at all, as the situation demands.’

‘But how do I know when to ask and when not to? How do I know when is the right time and when isn’t?’

‘You’ll learn.’ Her mother always smiles fondly at her. ‘My firecracker of a daughter.’

This time though, Margaret’s out-of-turn question is met with a grin from Father.

‘We have good news,’ he says, eyes twinkling, his hand resting on Mother’s. ‘You are to have a sibling.’

Margaret claps her hands in delight, setting Father’s teacup rattling in its saucer. ‘We’ll have a brother this time, I’m certain!’ Her sisters’ awed faces reflect her joy. ‘When are we to meet him, Father?’

‘In the new year. In the meantime, you are to take good care of your mother, and not to trouble her too much.’

‘Yes, Father,’ Margaret chimes in unison with her sisters, her heart overflowing at the thought of a little brother to cosset and boss, she no longer the youngest but a responsible older sister, looked up to and admired.

‘What’re you doing?’ Archana asks of her big sister, although she knows perfectly well that Radha, in cahoots with their good-for-nothing neighbours, Sinthu and Dinesh, is planning a raid on old Bhim’s orchard. Archana has been eavesdropping on their frenzied discussion from behind the banyan tree, the scent of sap and intrigue, her heart thrumming with the fear her sister obviously lacks, at the idea of sneaking out at night with boys to steal fruit.

‘Why are you here?’ Radha makes a face at Archana.

‘You know you shouldn’t be talking to boys,’ Archana says. ‘Especially now Ma and Da are actively looking for a husband for you.’ Archana and Radha’s parents have decreed that at fourteen, Radha is of marriageable age – she will soon be leaving the missionary school they both attend.

‘Respectable girls don’t talk to boys, they don’t even look at them, and they surely don’t shoot pebbles at them with a catapult from the top of a banyan tree! What were you thinking, Radha? You’re blessed with good looks, which will guarantee a good match. Don’t render them useless by getting a bad reputation,’ their mother had yelled when the village bully’s mother had complained to her about her tomboy daughter. ‘And you’ – her mother had turned on Archana. ‘God knows you need everything going for you with your sooty complexion and that limp – I worry if we can get you married at all, but if you’re caught mixing with boys and worse, being mean to them…’

‘But, Ma, I—’ Archana had begun.

‘She didn’t do anything,’ Radha had cut in, eyes flashing. ‘Why’re you scolding her?’

Her sister drove Archana crazy. She could be mean to her, but she was also her staunchest defender, her best friend.

‘Why’re you here?’ Radha repeats. ‘I’m busy.’

Sinthu and Dinesh nod along, looking brightly, avidly, at Radha, in her thrall like everyone who comes in contact with her.

‘I came looking for you. Ma said to come home as soon as we could. In fact, she didn’t want you to attend school at all today, remember? That suitor is coming to see you.’

Radha huffs. ‘I better go or I’ll never hear the end of it,’ she says to her companions, who sport identical disappointed expressions.

Radha stands, dusting her skirt, her veil slipping from her face in the process. All the boys in the field that serves as a school playground turn to look at her, starry-eyed, mouths wide and gaping.

Sinthu and Dinesh stand too, the other boys shooting envious glances, wishing they were in their hallowed position: friends and confidants of the prettiest girl in the village. Radha is different from every other girl: she not only talks to boys, unlike the other girls, who only afford them coy glances from beneath their veils, she also plays with them – but only these two boys, which makes her even more irresistible to the others.

Archana has overheard Aiman, the village bully, ask his gang, ‘What does she see in them?’, his voice a combination of disdain, anger and jealousy. Radha, laying siege from between the branches of a banyan tree, had just unerringly hit him with a pebble from a catapult.

‘Sinthu and Dinesh appreciate me for who I am,’ Radha likes to say.

Which means, Archana knows, that they allow her to lead them, willingly, into scrapes. Archana reluctantly tags along too, afraid of getting caught but not wanting to be left behind and, most of all, wanting to keep an eye on her sister, to try to stop her from going too far, save her from herself.

As they walk home, the sun a hard ball, Archana dragging her left leg, significantly shorter than the right, she asks, ‘Are you worried?’

Despite the sheen of sweat, her hair coming loose from her plait and crowding her forehead, falling in her eyes – she has not bothered with her veil as there is nobody else around – Radha glows.

She throws her lovely face to the wide, cloudless sky and laughs. ‘Worried? Why?’

It is hot. The sun beating down, harsh, relentless. The air perfumed with baked earth and roasted cinnamon, pungent with fermenting fruit, gritty with dust.

Archana is tired, her right leg aching from doing the work on behalf of both of her legs. ‘About marrying someone you don’t know.’

‘Oh, I’ll make sure I know him,’ her sister says, with that supreme, effortless confidence that Archana both envies and loves. Radha knowing that she can charm anybody, that they will love her, twirling in the middle of the dirt road, the skirt of her salwar ballooning in a graceful arc, bright with reflected sunlight, tinted orange with dust, sequinned with pebbles from squatting on mud. Spinning effortlessly in a way Archana can never do. A goddess with the whole world at her – equally aligned – feet.

‘What if he dies and you have to do sati?’ This has been playing on Archana’s mind since their mother explained that a dutiful wife, if her husband died before her, burned on his funeral pyre. It was the greatest sacrifice a wife could make; she would then be hallowed, venerated alongside goddesses!

‘Would you do it, Ma, if Da died?’ Archana had asked, lower lip trembling with dread, imagining her father dying and her mother sacrificing herself as well.

‘Of course. It would be an honour,’ her mother had replied, massaging her hair with coconut oil.

‘Who would look after us, then?’ Archana had queried, head aching with upset.

‘The villagers would, happily, for my sati would rain good fortune upon the entire village.’

Archana prayed her father wouldn’t die anytime soon. And although she hoped she’d get married, if only to ease her mother’s worry, she also wished her husband would live a long while – she didn’t want to be burned alive, no matter how much she was venerated afterward. And it went without saying that she wished the same for the man her sister would marry – Archana didn’t want her sister dying before her time either!

‘Oh, Archana!’ Radha’s laughter jolts Archana into the present. ‘You’re such a worrier!’ There is affection in her voice. ‘Let me get married first!’

‘Are you really planning to raid Bhim’s orchard?’ Archana asks, changing the topic to more immediate concerns.

Radha looks archly at her. ‘Why not? Don’t tell me I can’t. Scaredy-cat!’ Her tone teasing, musical with mirth.

Archana had been about to do just that, but… ‘Can I come?’ she asks instead.

Her sister tucks her hand in hers, sweaty and slick, a rare show of affection. She pinches Archana’s cheek. ‘When has saying no ever stopped you, eh? You may not be as openly bold as me, but in your quiet manner, you always get your way.’

‘Wait for me,’ Archana calls, dragging her unwieldy, unaccommodating leg along as fast as she can in an effort to catch up with Radha.

‘Hurry up, then. Did you have to tag along?’ her sister huffs, stopping to catch a breath. ‘At this rate, the others will get the best fruit and we’ll be left with the dregs. Bruised cashews, stunted mangoes. A bit like you,’ Radha says, and sniffs as Archana reaches her, panting from the effort.

Together, they make their way between the fields. It is dark but their path is lit by golden pinpricks of light – glow-worms. The air tastes of fruit and secrets, of companionship and daring.

They sit among the trees of Bhim’s orchard and eat the stolen fruit. Honey sweet and syrupy golden.

It will be worth it, Archana thinks, even if they are caught, for this moment. Squatting among the branches, Archana perched on the lowest one, so her uneven feet touch the ground. Her sister and neighbours in the branches above. Her stomach properly full for the first time in what feels like for ever – at home there is never enough food to go round, the best morsels reserved for their father after his hard work in the fields; the three of them make do with what is left.

‘Hey!’ A call among the fields. ‘Thief! Stop!’

A light bobbing towards them. The smell of Bhim’s sweat. Tart. Sour.

‘Run,’ the boys call, jumping off the trees.

‘Come, Archana,’ Radha hisses, her sister’s fruity breath on Archana’s face tasting of fear.

Archana tries, Radha pulling her along. But she can’t run fast enough.

Mother is shut in her room, has been for days.

‘She’s ill.’ Father curt. His radiance of the past few months, the happiness emanating from him at the anticipation of having a son, no longer in evidence.

‘Is our brother making her unwell…?’ Margaret has so many questions that they trip over her tongue in their rush to drop out. She knows that their sibling – who they’re all convinced will be a boy, their much-longed-for brother – is growing in her mother’s stomach, that he will come out when it is time. But how? Is it time now? Is that what’s making her mother ill?

Father’s face taut, sharp, like it never is with her, his moustache drooping, gives Margaret pause, causing the curl of worry that had bloomed in her chest since Mother was confined to her room to become a flood, threatening to drown her.

Despite being lit with inner joy, Mother had appeared wan the last few months. She walked strangely, and fell asleep in the middle of the day sometimes, even when Margaret was talking to her.

And now Mother has disappeared into her room and hasn’t been out for ages. The doctor has been with his big black bag, looking grim. Nurse and the rest of the staff venture in and out, but Margaret and her sisters are not allowed in. How is that fair?

‘Is this what happened when we were born? Did we make Mother ill too…?’ she’s tried.

‘That’s quite enough, Miss.’ Margaret is whisked away by Nurse and, unceremoniously, put to bed.

It’s so frustrating, nobody telling her or her sisters anything, only walking about with long faces.

It leaves Margaret with no recourse but to take matters into her own hands.

That evening, when Nurse has retired to her room, Margaret slips down the corridor to Mother’s room, looming shadows, huge and unfamiliar, making the short walk seem endless and strange, sinister, distorted.

The door to Mother’s room is shut, as expected, and despite her bravado in coming here, Margaret finds herself afraid to open it, worried about what she might find. She presses her ear to the door and when she hears the moans, low and pitiful, her mother’s voice but in a cadence, thick with pain, that Margaret has never encountered, she rushes back down the corridor, her small feet swallowed by the shadows, and into bed, burying her face in her pillow, trying to smother the sounds she has heard, willing the mother she knows back.

The next few days drag, full of worries, gargantuan, insurmountable. Everyone, from Father to Peggy and Jane, the housemaid, even Albert, sporting grave, sombre visages. Margaret, for the first time, does not have any questions – she is afraid to ask, afraid in case someone replies, confirming her worst fears. She spends her nights with the pillow pulled down over her head, and yet she fancies she hears moans. She wonders what is going on behind that closed door to Mother’s room, where the doctor goes daily with his ominous black bag, but she dares not ask.

Then, when Margaret has convinced herself she will never see Mother again, the door to her room opens and she emerges, spent, smaller somehow. Dark circles under her eyes accentuating her paleness. So delicate that Margaret worries that if she touches her, she will disappear. A wraith. An angel.

Once again they are summoned to the orangery for tea.

Mother – the diminished, fragile version that has emerged from her room – smiles as her daughters sit opposite her and Father, but it is a smile that smacks of devastation, that is more sad than when she is crying.

Father is morose, his face not lighting up when he sees them as usual, his moustache sallow, not shiny like always.

‘Mother, are you quite alright now? Why were you in your room? Why have you asked us here?’ Margaret is unable to stop the questions that have found release now that her mother is returned to her, even when Winnie bumps her knee with hers, a gentle remonstrance. ‘When is our brother…?’

At the mention of ‘brother’, her mother shuts her eyes. Her father sighs, rubbing his face with his hand, causing his moustache to droop even more.

Margaret’s sisters have given up all pretence of eating, their sandwiches halfway to their mouths. Margaret fidgets in her chair.

The silence is loud, oppressive.

Once again, Margaret is compelled by an urge to break it.

‘Something’s the matter, isn’t it?’ she says. ‘Mother, why’re you sad? Father, why’re you looking so grim?’

Mother opens her eyes, emitting a fake little tinkle of a laugh. It has no joy in it. ‘Oh, Meg, must you…’

‘Alice,’ Father says, laying a palm on Mother’s hand so her words dry up.

Father takes a deep breath and looks at each of them in turn. ‘Girls, your brother… He… We named him George, after me.’

‘He’s arrived?’ If so, then where is he? And why are her parents sad when they’ve been looking forward to his arrival so very much?

Mother lifts a hand to her lips. She looks ashen.

‘He…’ Once again, her father rubs a hand across his face. His voice when it comes is thick. ‘He was not breathing when he… He’s with the angels now.’

Angels? Margaret doesn’t understand. She opens her mouth to ask what it means but Evie lays a warning hand on hers. Her sisters’ faces mirror their mother’s, drained of all colour.

‘It is your mother’s wish that we install an angel statue in the walled garden to remember your brother by,’ her father is saying, but it is as if his voice is coming from far away as his earlier words reverberate in Margaret’s mind, their implication finally dawning.

Not breathing.

The sandwich is heavy and sodden, unpalatable, in Margaret’s mouth.

Outside, birds twitter, celebrating the buttery gold, early spring sunshine. Albert grumbles to himself as he works the soil. Daffodils nod in the sugary breeze. Jane hums hymns, her voice high and sweet, as she dusts the mounted portraits in the hall. From the kitchen waft the faint sounds of Cook giving one of her girls a piece of her mind.

But here in the orangery, with the doughy taste of bread, the sweet vanilla fragrance of cake, the silence is pungent with questions, stilted with shock and a terrible understanding as Margaret and her sisters come to terms with this, their first brush with death.

It is a time when Father is preoccupied, with no time for his daughters, his shoulders hunched, face pinched, moustache limp, and Mother is always sad, her grey eyes stormy with grief. She sits in the walled garden, with its profusion of cascading roses in all colours, the rich, syrupy amber fragrance of blooms and the newly installed angel statue a memorial to a lost son: George’s name is inscribed on the white marble base.

Margaret worries about her wisp of a mother, sitting outdoors, shivering under the blanket, when she has not been well, wondering why nobody, not Father nor Nurse, will reason with her instead of indulging her by wrapping yet another blanket round her thin, barely-there shoulders.

It is a time when the house is mired in silences, heavy and mournful, stifling, even Margaret succumbing to their sombre spell, all her myriad questions completely choked out of her.

Some months later, one afternoon, Father comes upon them in the orangery. Mother and Evie are sewing, Winnie and Margaret daydreaming.

Father’s face, until recently weighted with care, is now bright with determination, eyes shining, moustache twitching with purpose.

‘Alice,’ he says, taking their mother’s hand. ‘I’ve signed up to do my bit for the war effort, like we discussed.’

War.

Up until now, although Margaret knows of Peggy’s beau, Jane’s fiancé, Cook’s son and others from the village who have enlisted, excited to be fighting for their country, war has been a vaguely distant concept, something that is happening elsewhere, to other people.

But now it is here, in this room, insistent, demanding notice.

Margaret feels fierce pride rise up in her chest on her father’s behalf, and it is reflected in her sisters’ and mother’s eyes.

‘George, that’s very brave of you,’ their mother says.

Father gathers their mother in his arms and smiles over