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First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Bantam Press

an imprint of Transworld Publishers

Copyright © Lucy Dillon 2018

Cover illustrations by Shutterstock

Lucy Dillon has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Every effort has been made to obtain the necessary permissions with reference to copyright material, both illustrative and quoted. We apologize for any omissions in this respect and will be pleased to make the appropriate acknowledgements in any future edition.

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Version 1.0 Epub ISBN 9781473541788

ISBN 9780593080368

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Prologue

Betty Dunlop wasn’t scared of death, but then she hadn’t been scared of the Luftwaffe, the Cold War, the threat of a nuclear winter, salmonella, cholesterol, or any of her three varyingly awful husbands.

Lorna Larkham, though, wasn’t quite so relaxed about it. And the closer death glided towards Betty’s bedside in St Agnes’s Hospice, the faster Lorna’s own heart beat inside her chest, so hard she had to force her legs from twitching, and getting up and running away.

The carriage clock beside her seemed to have stopped; how could it still be just seven o’clock? Lorna had arrived at six to start her volunteer shift, and the ward sister had intercepted her before she’d even got her jacket off, to warn her that Betty – ninety-three the week before and still roller-set and Ellnetted to the nines – had started to decline overnight.

‘We knew something was up when she didn’t ring for her cocoa.’ The nurse put a hand on Lorna’s arm, seeing panic freeze her face. ‘She’s still with us, though. Keep the music going, chat even if she doesn’t reply. Let Betty know she’s not on her own. I’m just down the hall if you need me.’

Discreetly, Lorna lowered her knitting to check Betty’s hooded eyelids. Knitting had been one of Betty’s hobbies too, something they’d chatted about when she’d first dropped in, to offer an hour or so of company. Lorna always brought her wool bag along with her to the hospice; she found the rhythmic clicks and loops helped to fill the moments when the residents she was sitting with were half there, half not. Familiar noises for many of them, a childhood sound of mothers, aunties, darning and knitting, nattering away. As Lorna worked the rows, something of their characters seeped into the pattern: later, scraps of wool stuck between the needles reminded her unexpectedly of June’s knowing eyes or Mabel’s silk flowers. Betty, she already knew, would always be moss stitch: textured and Kelly green, the clean smell of Pears soap. She was about to turn her work round when an invisible nudge made her glance up.

Rudy, Betty’s anxious dachshund, was stirring in his basket. Outside, the fat white moon had slipped out from behind a cloud, and the room felt chillier, as if someone had opened a window.

Lorna’s pulse throbbed in her throat, alive and hot and determined. The music – some bland classical piece chosen by the last nurse – had finished, but Betty hadn’t breathed out.

Panic tightened a notch in her chest with every hum of the self-levelling bed. Was this it? Was this it? She blinked, searching for clues she didn’t want to see. Lorna had had ‘end of life’ training from the nurses, but she’d never been here before, not for real. The seconds in the room hung – then the sheets over Betty’s shrunken frame rose, and the world carried on. For the time being.

Lorna let out a breath, a shuddery echo of Betty’s, and gently touched the liver-spotted hand lying on top of the blanket, feeling the skin move under her fingertips. It was soft, and papery. Until quite recently, Lorna hadn’t believed death would ever catch up with Betty. She was so bright-eyed, firmly engaged with life even in the hospice. But last week, they’d talked about Christmas, just gone. Lorna had told her about her surprisingly funny nights in the homeless shelter (more volunteering to avoid her sister Jessica’s in-laws and their competitive board games) and Betty had confided what she’d been doing with her children, Peter, Susie and Rae. Her face had lit up as she described Rae’s delightful Christmas cake and Peter’s smart wool coat, but when Lorna had asked the nurse on duty when they’d called in, Debra had shaken her head. No visitors. Maybe that had been an early sign that Betty was beginning to slip away, like a sandcastle slowly falling back into the lapping tide.

‘We’re still here, Betty,’ she said more bravely than she felt. It rattled Lorna, the sense of the outward Betty and her inner self invisibly detaching from each other. ‘Me and Rudy. It’s OK.’

Betty herself certainly wasn’t afraid of what was coming. Her stories – and she had hundreds of stories – sparkled with careless courage: not just her nights shivering on West End rooftops, firewatching during the Blitz when she was barely older than Lorna’s niece, but afterwards, when she’d married a soldier, upped sticks to Canada, only to ditch the soldier and his fists for an alcoholic Italian chef; then she’d run a bar and sold Avon make-up, had a ‘surprise’ baby at forty-four with a slick lawyer called Herb, moved back to Hendon with his cash when he died. Betty’s life had been one exuberant leap of faith after another, landing on her small feet each time like a cat.

Lorna watched Betty floating back into the shadows of her memories, and heard that smoky voice in her head. ‘Fear’s good for you, darling,’ she’d laughed, when Lorna blanched at her anecdotes. ‘Shows you where the edges of yourself are.’

‘I don’t want to see my edges, thanks,’ Lorna had said, chicken that she was.

‘Why not?’ Betty’s eyebrows were magnificent, haughty like Joan Crawford’s. ‘Your edges might not be where you think they are.’

Lorna flipped through the CDs by the bed. Betty had her nailed. She didn’t know where her edges were. In fact, she wondered a lot of things about herself, questions that she’d never ask because there was no one left to answer. Mum gone, Dad gone, and, with that, their little world had closed up behind them, leaving her and Jessica more alone than ever. Who was she meant to be? What traits or weaknesses, already brewing in her blood, might emerge as the years passed and she overtook her parents into middle age and beyond? Questions, and the blankness of never knowing, crept up on Lorna while she was sitting up late on nights like these, when the air swarmed with memories, hers and Betty’s mingling in their shared silence.

Rudy circled in his basket and laid his head on his paws. Lorna slid Glenn Miller’s big band orchestra into the player. If Betty’s train was departing the station tonight, she’d want something with a bit of swing to take her on to the next destination. She pressed play and picked up her knitting, bracing herself for the last half-hour. Only thirty minutes. It wouldn’t happen on her watch. Betty was too much of a dame for that.

She knitted and listened, two rows, three rows, four. ‘I can never get moss stitch right,’ Lorna murmured, just so Betty would know she was there. ‘It always goes too lumpy.’ But as the light moved across the room, she looked up and saw immediately something had changed. Betty’s nose and cheekbones were sharpening as her breathing became phlegmy, and a metallic taste began to rise in Lorna’s own throat. She glanced across to the button that would summon the nurse, but then steeled herself. Not yet. She could do this.

The old lady exhaled deeply, loudly, and Lorna wondered if she was seeing someone in her dreams that warranted a sigh. Someone stepping out of the wailing sirens and broken walls and dusty tea of her youth, where terror made everything vivid and fleeting, and ripe for the taking, right now. Holding out a hand, with a smile.

‘Little Brown Jug’ turned into ‘Moonlight Serenade’, Betty’s favourite, and her hand twitched on the sheet. Lorna watched: which of her husbands would come for her? Which would she choose? Were her relatives approaching, her mother and father, a Victorian grandmother? That thought was comforting. That even if you were lying alone somewhere, or in a sterile hospital bed, there’d be familiar faces there, reaching for you with love, wanting to see you again. Yearning for you more than life.

Something hollowed inside her, dank and cold like a sea cave.

She rested the knitting on her knee for a moment, forcing herself to stay with the darkness. Lorna didn’t know what her own mother’s last moments had been like, and it haunted her. Whether they’d been peaceful like Betty’s, whether there’d been pain, a struggle for air, regret and panic. It had been a heart attack: Lorna’s father had found Cathy in her studio, surrounded by a pool of her own spilled ink, not blood. And then he’d died too, a year to the day later. Which was either a tragic coincidence, or – if Lorna and Jess were honest with each other – no coincidence at all.

Rudy lifted his head and whimpered. His ears pulled back, and he turned to her, quivering with fear.

Lorna realised her eyes were full and wet, and her attention snapped back to the responsibility she had here. The parched gaps in between breaths were getting longer.

At the start of the month, Betty had been alive enough to talk about her Agatha Christie-like plans for after her death with glee. ‘I’ve put you in my will!’ she’d confided as Lorna had been coiling her long hair under her winter hat, hurrying to catch the night bus. ‘I’m leaving you something to remind you of me.’

Lorna had protested – there were rules about that and, besides, it wasn’t why she came. But Betty would hear none of it.

‘Nonsense. It’s just a little something, and I want you to have it. I’ve no one else to leave it to. It’s just to remind you to be scared once in a while, Lorna.’ And she’d squeezed her gloved hand with determination. A squeeze that brooked no argument.

Lorna looked down at those fingers now, cold and stiff, all eight rings taken off by doctors, kept safe in a bag by the hospice staff. She’d heard all their tales apart from the ruby one, and she felt a stab of regret that she might never find out why Betty saved it till last. She didn’t want Betty to go, but she’d done all the living she wanted to. It was so quiet, too simple for such a profound moment.

The moon moved behind the curtain, throwing a softer pool of light into the room, and the music changed again. Lorna’s skin prickled; the air seemed to fill with big-band orchestras and invisible dancers, stepping soundlessly through an ethereal spotlight, swirling in a last dance before the blackout. ‘I’m still here, Betty,’ she whispered, ‘with Rudy,’ then wondered if it was fair to try to keep Betty with her, if she wanted to go.

She willed herself to be calm, to be a comforting presence, but the fears edged through. What if Betty’s eyes snapped open? What if she tried to speak? What if she needed help that Lorna couldn’t give? Betty, what happened with the Italian chef? Why Montreal? Did loving life more than love make it easier to start again when the romance died, or was there one, one man you never forgot, one man who made every other seem that bit duller?

Rudy whimpered again, and then gave two short barks. And, her heart scuttling with panic, Lorna cracked.

She fumbled for the buzzer that would bring the night nurse into the room, gripped it in one hand to be sure, and pressed it as hard as she could. But as the nurse’s footsteps clicked down the hall, followed by another swifter pair, Rudy lay down with his long nose on his paws and let out a low groan that brought tears to Lorna’s eyes.

Her heart contracted and she longed to throw her arms open to catch the spirits in the room, which she couldn’t see or feel, and beg them to tell her that everything was all right, that everything would be fine, that everyone was still there, just in a different form.

But she couldn’t. And there would be no answer anyway.

As Lorna stumbled into the bright light of the corridor, she heard Betty’s voice in her head, husky and alive.

‘You know, Lorna, those cracks in your heart, where things didn’t work out quite as you hoped, but you patched yourself up and carried on? That’s where the light gets in.’

She turned back, and there was a slim shaft of moonlight slipping through the curtains.

Chapter One

‘Here’s to Mum and Dad,’ said Jessica, raising her cup of tea in a toast towards the distant hills. ‘Wherever they are.’

‘Mum and Dad.’ Lorna lifted her cup, took a sip and gagged. There had to be at least two sugars in there, and she hadn’t taken sugar in her tea for years.

Lorna turned to her older sister to ask her if she was trying to make a point about her not being sweet enough, then saw the pensive way she was staring out into the distance, and decided to leave it. It was January, bitterly cold, and it had been quite a hike up from the car park; maybe the sugar wasn’t a bad idea. They still had half a Bakewell tart to finish – Dad’s birthday treat, brought in his honour – and the tea was to remember Mum, drunk out of her china cups with the tiny forget-me-nots, the last survivors from her mum’s mum’s massive china service. Mum had always had two sugars, maybe that was what Jess had been thinking of when she poured it. These small traditions were a bit like the cups, Lorna thought: fragments of a bigger picture. Like her and Jess. The last remnants of a family set that had dwindled, through breakages and carelessness, to just the two of them.

The wind coming off the hills really was cold. She hugged her parka more tightly around herself, and gazed out over the rolling landscape below them, where orange-cagouled walkers and grey sheep roamed for their entertainment. The walkers were determined and sticking to the winding tracks, but the sheep seemed to be enjoying themselves more.

Mum would have picked out every tiny detail in this, she thought, and the scene in front of her morphed into one of Cathy Larkham’s trademark pen-and-ink sketches: the stark trees, the hills serrated with paths, snow-dusted at the edges like a Bundt cake, the children wobbling along in bright wellies, the birds and the hopeful dogs, twisting back, watching for a thrown tennis ball. And the two women observing it all from a bench, one tall, one small, with their Thermos flask and their box of cake and their matching hats with bobbles. The bobble hats were another memorial touch: knitted by their dad’s mum for a long-ago Christmas, found by Jess while she was emptying the house after he died. Blue for Jess, red for Lorna. Fat pom-poms on each one, bobbing when they moved.

The first time they’d sat here on this bench, overlooking the British Camp in Malvern, was the wintry day they’d scattered the ashes of Cathy and Peter Larkham, handfuls of ash mingling in the heavy casket in the same way their parents’ lives had mingled, until it was impossible to see where one began and the other ended. In death, so in life. Or possibly the other way around.

Lorna made an effort to summon her parents in her mind. It was slightly harder every year and it bothered her that she always seemed to start now with their clothes – Mum’s grey linen shirts, her pale arms under the rolled-up sleeves, speckled with freckles; Dad’s green ‘weekend’ jumper that Jess had bought in one of her many efforts to drag him into the twenty-first century. He’d always dressed like a history teacher. Left to himself, Dad would have worn the same navy cords and two checked shirts in rotation for ever, his own school uniform. He dutifully brought out the weekend jumper every time either Jess or Lorna visited, but always with a shirt; the collar poked out of the crew neck as if it was fighting the enforced casualness.

A thought suddenly occurred to Lorna.

‘Jess?’ She turned to her big sister. ‘Did Dad ever say why he wanted to be scattered here with Mum? I know they liked the area but …?’

Jess was checking her phone – it was supposed to be on silent so they could focus on remembering their parents but Jess had three children with active social lives and a husband who referred every household decision to her, and she got twitchy if her phone didn’t beep for five minutes. ‘I think it was something to do with the view?’

‘The view? Why? What’s special about it?’ Lorna scanned the horizon, trying to absorb any special details, any clue from the great beyond, but it was just … a nice view. She couldn’t remember coming here as a family; they’d moved schools whenever Dad did – Brecon, Newcastle, Carlisle – but she couldn’t remember a Significant Moment here in Malvern. The closest they’d been was Longhampton, about thirty miles further west.

‘Dunno.’ Jess looked up from her texts. ‘Oh, no, wait – I do know. It was one of their places, before we were born. There’s a photo of the two of them here, sitting on this bench, holding hands. Very seventies – Mum looks about nine, like she might take off if the wind got under her flares.’ She paused and rolled her eyes. ‘Dad’s wearing his cords, obviously. The original ones.’

‘I have never seen that photo.’

Jess put her phone down and sighed. There was a lot in the sigh. ‘Well, I only saw it once. I was helping Dad with the paperwork after Mum died and he was looking through some of her albums. I’d never seen them before either. He couldn’t remember half the people – they were mostly photos of Mum. She hadn’t written anything on the back.’

‘They knew and they really never considered we might want to know, one day, did they?,’ said Lorna. After their mother’s sudden heart attack, Dad spent most of his days leafing through old photographs, gazing at Mum’s paintings and keeping everything exactly as she’d left it, in case it had all been a bad dream and she might walk through the door with his Guardian. Jess had been there with him more than Lorna had because soon after the funeral, in a fit of carpe diem, Lorna had enrolled on a Fine Art course in Italy. She’d always wanted to study art, secretly hoping the right course would unlock a hidden gift, but it hadn’t taken long to realise this wasn’t going to happen. The course was demanding, and Lorna had had to force herself to go back at the start of each term. Usually by reminding herself how much it was costing her to discover she hadn’t inherited her mother’s talent for life drawing.

‘He said something about this being the bench where Mum had decided to give up teaching and paint full time. I think he might have proposed to her here too, I’m not sure.’ A lot about their parents’ life, pre-children, was a mystery to Jess and Lorna. It was a close marriage, bordering on telepathic; a web of smiles and in-jokes that didn’t leave much room for other people. ‘He got very emotional. His mouth went all flat, you know?’

‘Oh no. He cried?’ Lorna had never seen her dad cry until her mum died; after that the slightest thing set him off. A thumbed paperback, an old plate. On one sad occasion, a pair of shoes. It made Lorna feel even more useless that she couldn’t even guess when to comfort him, let alone know what to say.

Jess nodded, then paused, cup at her lips. ‘It’s funny, I thought he’d talk more about Mum after she died. I mean, we were the only people who knew her as well as he did, but he didn’t. I gave him lots of chances, but he wouldn’t. It was like he’d gone into his own head. I don’t think it even occurred to him that I might want to talk about her. My mother. Maybe I should have tried harder? Maybe if I had …’ Her voice trailed away.

‘Stop.’ Lorna leaned her shoulder against Jess’s. Losing both Mum and Dad within a year of each other had changed everything, too quickly. They’d dealt with it in different ways but the hardest part for both of them had been watching Dad crumble before their bewildered eyes; with one half of himself gone, he was so obviously a lover with a broken heart it was impossible to see him as their gentle, bumbling dad any more. He was a man, a man they couldn’t heal. A stranger neither she nor Jess could burden with their own grief. ‘You’d have been talking about two different people. His wife. Our mum.’

‘When you think about it, Mum and Dad … we knew they met at university, they always had that wedding photo on the mantelpiece, but what stories do we know? We don’t even know exactly why we’re sitting here right now. There are so many questions I wish I’d asked …’ Jess bit her lip. ‘I tell Hattie and Milo and Tyra about how their dad and I met, how they came to be. They love hearing it. We’re all part of the same story. Our story.’

Lorna side-eyed her sister. ‘Really? And how do you tell the story of how Hattie came to be? As a morality tale about young love overcoming all? Or as a warning about getting your contraception advice from someone’s big sister at school?’

That broke Jess’s stride. She frowned. ‘I tell it as a story of how you can make things work out if you want it badly enough.’ Then she conceded, ‘And also about reading medication instructions, obviously. Anyway, Hattie’s a different kind of sixteen. She’s far more open with me about her life because I actually listen to what …’ The words stuck in her throat, and Jess’s blue eyes clouded over. Lorna knew what she was feeling: even now, years after, sadness could rush out of nowhere. Each passing year delivered new angles on grief as life moved you on, and you saw your old self differently: the pity was sharper because you hadn’t realised it was pity-worthy before.

She leaned into her sister, feeling the softness of Jess’s body under the parka, the warmth radiating outwards from her big, brave heart.

‘You and Hattie are so different from us and Mum,’ said Lorna. ‘You don’t have secrets, because you’re part of her life. You two enjoy spending time together. Mainly in your role as her driver, but still. You and Ryan, you’re just as close as Mum and Dad but you’ve always put Hattie in the middle. And now Milo and Tyra.’

‘I’m not saying the way Mum and Dad brought us up was wrong, but if I got run over by a bus tomorrow, Hattie wouldn’t be sitting here wondering anything. No secrets, no regrets, no I love yous we didn’t say.’ Jess turned her phone over; its cover was a black-and-white photo of her, Ryan, Hattie, Tyra and Milo, piled up in a mass of bare feet, white T-shirts and Ryan’s family’s toothy grin. ‘That’s what life’s about, Lorna. Love, and honesty. And family.’

‘Don’t get run over by a bus.’ Jess was veering dangerously close to one of her favourite topics – how Lorna should get on with surrounding herself with a nuclear family like the Protheros. Lorna didn’t want that, for various reasons, but Jess still tried to persuade Lorna otherwise whenever they met up. Jess had gone into teaching, like their dad; she had a mission to improve everything she saw. Maximise its potential.

‘Like I’ve got time to find a bus to be run over by. But seriously, Lorna …’ Her expression changed. ‘You’re part of our family, you know. This Christmas, we missed you. Ryan’s family can be hard work, but you didn’t have to spend it with waifs and strays.’

‘I wanted to. It was fun. The dogs wore tinsel collars and there was no Cranium.’ She changed the subject, quickly. ‘So what are you doing later? Isn’t tonight Ryan’s five-a-side night?’

‘It certainly is. First match after the Christmas break, always painful.’ Jess tipped out the tea from her mug, and brushed the cake crumbs off her denim skirt. ‘Do you want a lift to the station? Tyra’s off to a party at four, then I need to drop Hattie at Wagamama for her evening shift. At least you can read all the way back to London.’ She sounded briefly envious. ‘I remember reading … for fun.’

‘I’m not going back to London tonight,’ said Lorna, gathering her bag and scarf and following her sister down the gravel path to the car park. ‘I’ve got an appointment in Longhampton this afternoon.’

‘Longhampton?’ Jess looked over her shoulder, surprised. She’d trained herself never to look surprised if she could help it.

‘Yup. I’ve got an appointment at a gallery there.’

‘Oh? For work?’

Lorna was a Collection Administrator for a charity that loaned artworks to hospitals and other places with too many white walls and not enough joy. Her job was to match the art with the location, and then supervise the installation and collection of the paintings, sculptures, collages or whatever seemed to bring some positive energy to the space. Recently her boss had finally given her an acquisitions role, and Jess had been impressed with the budget Lorna had to manage, less impressed with the art she’d acquired. Jess preferred art to look like their mother’s detailed illustrations: meticulously rendered nuggets of reality.

‘No, not for work, for me. I’m thinking of buying it.’

Jess’s expression said it all. ‘Which gallery are we talking about? I can’t even remember one.’

‘That little one on the high street, next to that gift shop where we used to get birthday presents. It had navy walls and gold stars on the walls.’ As a young teenager Lorna had drifted through its stained-glass door every time they went shopping in town, saving up her pocket money for treasures. Jess saved up for Clinique foundation and her driving test. ‘It was where I bought that mixed-media portrait of a mermaid, the one I had in my room? The bakery that did the lemon tarts was on the other side?’

‘Oh, yeah …’ Jess seemed nostalgic for a moment. She liked lemon tarts. ‘I do remember it. Did they sell anything of Mum’s?’

‘She let them have one or two, I think.’ Cathy Larkham hadn’t needed a gallery; once the series of modern fairy stories she’d illustrated for an old university friend turned into international bestsellers, she could have sold every one of her paintings before she started. And then, ironically, like Rapunzel, she rarely left the painting shed in their garden, drawing and colouring and creating worlds bigger than the one she lived in.

‘And is this all definite?’ Jess asked. ‘Have you signed anything?’

‘Not yet. But I’ve made up my mind. I need to move my life on, Jess. This is where I need to start.’

They were at Jess’s car now, a 4×4 crammed with car seats and plastic cups, crisp packets and general child-related junk. The chaos, contradicted by the cocoon-like car seats, made Lorna twitchy: something about the relentless care required to keep these vulnerable creatures from harm, plus the mess. Ryan’s company car was nothing like this: he drove a pristine silver Lexus, which he cleaned every Sunday morning, rain or shine, with a special ‘semi-pro’ cleaning kit. He’d done that ever since he and Jess bought their first house together, aged twenty-two. That also made Lorna twitchy, but for different reasons.

Jess put her bag on the bonnet while she searched for her keys in its tissue-flecked depths, then stopped. She sighed and said, ‘I don’t want to pour cold water on your plans, and it’s great you’re being more positive about life, but a gallery … do you think it’s a good idea?’

‘Why? You know I’ve always wanted to have my own gallery. And I’ve been waiting for the right one to come up, not rushing into anything. This is a decent little business, with room to expand, and there’s accommodation upstairs. The whole thing costs half what I’m paying in rent now.’ Lorna lifted her hands. ‘I could live upstairs and fill the downstairs with my unmade bed, call it performance art, and still save money! There’s literally nowhere smaller I can rent in Zone Three. I’m storing my laundry in the bath.’

‘But your job – weren’t they talking about promoting you?’

‘No. They were talking about re-organisation. Our funding got cut at the end of the year, and we’re all on freelance contracts now.’ Lorna hadn’t wanted to talk about that with Jess, not today, but Jess’s expression had gone very school-teachery, whether she realised it or not. ‘I mean,’ she added, reluctantly, ‘I’ve still got a role – just with fewer hours and less pay. And at the end of the day, I’d rather use my savings starting my own business than use them up subsidising my actual job. Anthony will give me work if I need it.’

‘Oh, Lorna.’ Jess was clearly struggling not to start making a bullet-point list of the reasons this was a terrible idea. ‘I just … Longhampton? I know you’re experienced in taking art into miserable places but … seriously?’

Lorna met her sister’s gaze. Her eyes were concerned, but also haunted. Jess rarely looked haunted; she’d always reminded Lorna of a pre-Raphaelite model, untroubled and calm, with wide-set eyes and a serene resting expression. She made plans in the face of storms, and she saw them through. ‘Why not?’

‘Do you really want to go back there? After everything that happened?’

It hung in the air between them: the memories, the emotions, the younger versions of themselves that seemed like different people looking back, doing things they never talked about anymore.

‘I’m thirty,’ said Lorna, quietly. ‘By the time Mum was my age, she’d found Dad, she’d had you and me, people were queuing up for her work. She was blossoming. Whereas I’m just … I’m just treading water. And fine, I’m not an artist, I don’t have what Mum had, I’ve come to terms with that.’ She stared over the car park, where a couple were trying to load an arthritic Labrador into the back of a Fiesta. Jess was one of the few people she could be honest with; one of the few people who knew how hard she’d wanted to discover some inherited talent, how hard she’d dug into herself, only to come up with nothing. ‘So the next best thing is having a gallery where I can find people who do have talent, and encourage them and be responsible for bringing beauty into other people’s lives.’

‘But after what you went through with that shop in …’

‘That was a learning curve,’ she said stubbornly. ‘And I learned from it. I’m not going to make those mistakes again. I can’t afford to!’

She couldn’t, either. Jess had put her inheritance into a bigger house, a trust fund for the kids, laying foundations for her family; Lorna had invested in a dream that hadn’t worked out. First the Fine Art course, then a pop-up gallery. But there was a little left, enough for this final gamble.

‘I need a challenge and this feels like Fate.’ It seemed too glib, compressing nights of internet-scanning, brainstorming and budgeting into one small sentence. ‘The price, and the location, and the connection with Mum … I’m giving myself one year, and I’m going into it with my eyes open this time. One year. So you’ll have to buy at least fifteen birthday and anniversary presents from me, OK?’

Jess sighed and grabbed Lorna’s hands. Gambles weren’t her thing. She’d made one in her whole life, and it had come off, but she’d played everything very safe after that. ‘I want this to work for you, Lorn, I really do.’ She paused. ‘But I will expect a family discount on the birthday cards.’

Two hours later, Lorna was sitting in a café that had been a tailor’s the last time she’d been in Longhampton. She gazed across the main road at the gallery that had once inspired her to paint the bedroom she shared with her sister navy, with gold stars.

Like nearly everything from her childhood that Lorna remembered with love, it had changed. It was still an art gallery and the door was still stained glass, but the dark mystery had been stripped back to whiteness. White walls, white wood, white shelves, lots of white light. But there were bright colours just inside, vivid and intriguing against the blank background.

Lorna curled her hand around her coffee, served fashionably in a glass, not a cup (flat whites had reached Longhampton) and remembered the smell of the gallery then: oil paint and a Diptyque fig candle. Moments from her adolescence flashed through her mind like slippery fish: the familiar red and white pole of the barber’s on the corner, the Saturday afternoon circuit of Dorothy Perkins to the big WHSmiths, to Topshop, to the café where Jess met Ryan and he bought Lorna hot chocolate deluxe with marshmallows if she pretended they’d been together all day, instead of letting the pair of them sneak off for an hour or two. There were four years between the Larkham sisters; at fifteen, when Jess started going out with Ryan, that was a huge difference. Jess would have been in as much trouble for abandoning eleven-year-old Lorna in town with hot chocolate and a dog-eared Cosmopolitan as she would for getting up to God knows what with Ryan behind the cricket pavilion.

There was a red To Let sign on the window above the main gallery frontage. Lorna had never noticed but there were at least two floors above it, as there were above all the shops along the high street. She knew now, from the business agents’ details on the table in front of her, that the gallery’s flat comprised a large kitchen-diner, a spacious reception room with feature fireplace and no fewer than four bedrooms and two bathrooms. And an attic.

A business, and a place to live. Not just to live either, to spread out. To enjoy her possessions instead of storing them. Lorna took deep breaths to stop the jitteriness spreading through her. She knew she should be studying the number of customers the gallery had, what the footfall was, what the hard facts were, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t stop looking at the original glass details in the door – curling ivy and mistletoe which hadn’t been removed in the general Tippexing of the place – and feeling a weird certainty that this gallery had come available to her for a reason.

She saw her own reflection in the window of the café, and thought, I can do this. Betty had always insisted that good things happened to brave women. She’d put on red lipstick to summon up Betty’s pizzazz, and angled her grey beanie the way her mum had, letting her straight blonde hair fall around her face like Faye Dunaway.

Her appointment to view with the current gallery owner was at five on the dot. Lorna finished the last centimetre of her coffee, blotted her lips on the white napkin so it left a perfect heart-shaped kiss, and walked over the road to her destiny to a big band playing in her head.

Chapter Two

There were only two other people in the Maiden Gallery when Lorna pushed open the door, and as she stepped in, both customers looked relieved and immediately began making for the exit.

The middle-aged woman sitting at the counter put down her crossword, and smiled. She had fine white hair in a candy-floss wisp around her head, and jaunty rainbow-striped glasses on a long chain. ‘Hello there!’ she said. ‘Let me know if there’s anything I can tell you about today’s exhibition.’

Lorna assumed she was talking about the collection of massive close-ups of sheep’s heads that lined one white wall. Whoever had painted those had clearly developed a keen interest in nostrils. Even though there was something unsettling about them once you’d seen three giant sheep in a row, apparently ramming (ho ho) their heads against invisible windows, they were still a lot more interesting than anything else in the gallery: detailed close-ups of flowers, detailed close-ups of apple cores and, in a daring break from the norm, half a wall of pastel canvases featuring silhouetted birds perched on telephone wires.

It was more like a dentist’s waiting room than an art gallery, Lorna thought, and the excitement began to seep out of her. This definitely wasn’t how she remembered the Maiden Gallery. It no longer smelled of figs and paint and birthdays. It no longer had surprises wherever you looked, or paintings that stuck in your imagination. It didn’t even have a black cat stalking around. All galleries needed a black cat.

But she didn’t have to sell sheep’s heads, she reminded herself. The sheep could be replaced with something better. Something fresh and new and as yet undiscovered.

Lorna pulled herself together and extended a hand. ‘I’m not actually here for the exhibition, I’m here to view the gallery,’ she said. ‘I’m Lorna Larkham. Are you Mary? The agents suggested you could show me around.’

The lady put her pen down and a smile lit up her face as she pushed the glasses further up her nose. ‘Ah ha! I’m Mary Knowles – lovely to meet you! Welcome to the Maiden! Everything is Maid-en Longhampton … Do you see?’

‘Oh!’ Lorna had genuinely never worked that out. ‘Oh … right.’

They shook hands and as her gaze roamed further around, Lorna felt bad for dismissing the art on display. It wasn’t all terrible. Just a bit meh. Beyond the initial room of sheep, she could see glass cabinets with handmade jewellery ranging from clunky to Supply Art Teacher, and items carved from wood.

‘Do you want to look at the gallery or the flat first?’ Mary enquired. ‘The gallery is quite self-explanatory, I suppose, with the two front rooms, and then we go back a little way …’ She stood up and showed Lorna through to the second room, which was much like the first but with a wall of tiny paintings of sheep in enormous felted frames, and more spinners with birthday cards. The floors were nice, though – thick oak planks that hadn’t been painted white. Yet.

‘This is our ceramics room,’ Mary went on. ‘We usually put Jim Timson’s pottery in here but he’s got a bad back and can’t face the kiln until he’s seen the specialist. So we’re selling what’s left from Penny Wright’s last collection.’

Lorna peered round the corner into the back room. This at least was more like her memories: the pottery had always been in here, goblets with curling greenery like Viking celebration vessels, and enormous bowls that were only good for pot pourri. Now, there were two tables filled with wonky cheese plates. The ceiling sloped where some stairs ran above, and there was a boarded-up fireplace festooned with icicles made out of coloured resin.

Mary clapped a hand to her chest. ‘Oh, sorry, they’re left over from Christmas. I should have moved those by now. I’ve been rushed off my feet …’

Lorna privately doubted that, but she asked anyway. ‘Were you very busy over Christmas?’

‘Well, not so much, but I’m here on my own and I’m supposed to be running down the stock. My husband retired, and insisted that I gave up the gallery so we could both have some time off, and I said yes, so Keith went ahead and booked a whole series of golfing breaks, and then Jackie who used to pop in a few days a week got another job because I gave her notice, so I was on my own, which wouldn’t have been a problem if we’d managed to move on, but I said I’d keep the place open until the agents found a new tenant, you see. And since then we haven’t had any interest, which is disappointing, and …’

‘Do you want to show me upstairs?’ asked Lorna.

The stairs up to the flat were at the back of the gallery, past some shelves of mixed media collages that looked as if someone had emptied a Hoover bag on a glue-covered canvas, an office, and a pile of boxes marked ‘Terry’s Dream Unicorns – returns’. Although the carpet was threadbare, Lorna could make out thick wooden treads beneath them, and some of the tickling excitement began to return.

‘Up we go!’ Mary eyed the steep staircase with little enthusiasm, then began hauling herself upwards.

‘You never fancied living here yourselves?’ Lorna asked, giving Mary a discreet head start.

‘Not really. We live out in Hartley, where we could have a bit of a garden. We could have taken in lodgers, I suppose, but Keith had a bad experience with a buy-to-let … Of course it’s handy for storage.’ Mary reached the top and got her breath back. ‘Sorry it’s so cold. I should have thought to put the heating on.’

She unlocked the front door and stepped back, so Lorna could see into the flat properly. ‘This is it …’

‘Wow,’ said Lorna, because she couldn’t help herself.

The dark narrowness of the stairs opened up into an unexpectedly large landing, light and airy, and echoing with lack of furniture. Ahead of them was the kitchen, with three long sash windows looking on to the main street, and a heavy pine table that had obviously been too much hassle to move out once it was there. Lorna’s eye was drawn immediately across the kitchen to the perky red geraniums in the windowboxes of the house opposite; the kitchen was at double-decker-bus level, high enough to notice the furbelows and moulded garlands on the upper-storey façades.

‘And that’s a storage room, as you can see, but it’s a sitting room really.’ A smaller room to the left was stacked with canvases and brown boxes, with a worn-out sofa opposite a fireplace. The stairs continued to wind round behind them, up to the second floor, and higher.

I wouldn’t have enough furniture to fill this place, thought Lorna, and the idea thrilled her. So much space! An empty room, just for art and thinking and yoga. It would be amazing.

‘I always forget how big it is. Two storeys and an attic. Excuse this mess.’ Mary’s boots were loud on the floorboards as she darted into the storeroom to tidy the stacks of paintings. They weren’t messy, Lorna thought, quite the opposite. The rooms were full of inspiration, people’s dreams and imagination. ‘These shouldn’t be here. We were supposed to have returned these to Donald. Trouble is, these artists, they look so hurt when things don’t sell … Four bedrooms, two baths. Though I can’t say what the bathrooms are like. We used one of them to store ice for the last proper private view …’

Lorna turned round slowly, taking everything in. She’d always had to share: first a childhood bedroom with snoring, fussy, constantly revising Jess, then with other friends in a student house, then flatshares, and then when she’d finally been able to afford a place of her own, it was so tiny that she could only have one friend round at a time. This was the lavish, airy space she’d craved for years – space to put up shelves for her ceramics, and set her clothes out on rails like a designer boutique, space to be alone, to hang everything she’d collected up on the walls. Space to let her own self spread out.

And it was cheaper than her current rent. So much cheaper it made her want to laugh.

‘Have you run a gallery before?’ Mary was speaking, and Lorna turned round. The friendly smile suggested she wasn’t asking in an interviewing way, more out of conversation.

Even so, Lorna felt herself hedging around the question. ‘No, not really. Well, I’ve, um, dabbled.’

That was a terrible answer. But she didn’t want to go into all that now, and anyway, it was in the past. The pop-up in Shoreditch had never seemed further away than it did now.

But at the same time, Lorna could feel the strange tingle of belief again. And this time she didn’t need anyone’s second opinion.

Betty’s funeral took place in a sombre crematorium miles from the hospice and even further from the colourful scenes of her long and dramatic life.

It was a quiet service. The only other attendees apart from Lorna were a couple of old ladies from the hospice, and three nurses. Debra had come in on her day off, to pay her respects to the smart woman who’d taught her daughter how to beehive her hair for prom – and, when Debra wasn’t listening, told her how to stop a boy’s hands from wandering. There were none of Betty’s family there at all.

It came as a shock to Lorna, after her conversation with Betty about Christmas, to discover that Betty’s children had predeceased her, many years earlier. Naughty little Susie, who loved trifle ‘apart from the sherry’, had been killed twenty years ago, in a car accident; clever Peter the accountant had had a stroke; Debra wasn’t sure what had happened to Rae, other than that she’d never been on the hospice’s radar.

‘It’s sad,’ she whispered to Lorna as the coffin disappeared behind the curtain for the last time and the sound of Glenn Miller indicated discreetly that they could leave. ‘Doesn’t matter how popular you are, once you get over ninety, most funerals are like this – your mates are waiting for you on the other side, not here. Good on you for coming, though. Betty really appreciated your visits.’

Lorna had managed a weak smile. Getting a bus to Streatham and singing a hymn she didn’t know seemed like the least she could do for a woman who’d given her the kick up the bahookie, as Betty would have put it, to phone the estate agent and put her money where her dreams were. The Maiden Gallery was now hers, to transform as best she could, sheep and all.

In the Garden of Remembrance, Lorna laid three red carnations on the memorial, blew a kiss up into the grey south London sky, and promised Betty that from that moment on, she would take a deep breath and do her damnedest to feel her edges, wherever they were. And also to wear lipstick as often as possible.

Before she left, Debra had given Lorna a note from the matron asking her to call in at the hospice next time she was passing, and she went the following morning, on her way to the bank to set up a new business account. Lorna had intended to let the volunteer organisers know about her move to Longhampton in any case – and to ask if there were any similar schemes that they knew of in the area.

At first, the volunteering had been a suggestion by a therapist she’d seen after her father died, as a way of working through her pain about their strained relationship at the end, her anger with herself that she hadn’t been able to unlock his silent grief, the awkward silences filled with ticking clocks. But Lorna soon realised the problem wasn’t talking: she enjoyed spending time with the patients she sat with. They weren’t her dad, they weren’t hosting glum elephants in the room that squashed all conversation flat. Some had great anecdotes; some had mastered companionable silence; whether they chatted or not, they all taught her something, and she would miss it, Lorna thought, as the nurse on duty walked her down to the matron’s office. Probably more than they’d miss her.

Kathryn’s office was a peaceful room with a view on to the special sensory garden, but though it was a drizzly day outside, inside it felt unseasonally floral. On the table by the door was a large vase full of scented tiger lilies but, after a moment or two, Lorna realised that even their pungent fragrance wasn’t masking the even more pungent fragrance of dog, emanating from the wicker dog carrier by her desk. Inside which, she could just see, was Rudy.

The flowers weren’t normally there. She was almost certain they’d been placed there by one of the nurses to minimise Rudy’s presence.

‘Now we’ve finally got Betty’s paperwork sorted out, I can give you this,’ said Kathryn, once Lorna was sitting in the easy chair opposite.

She slid a padded envelope across the desk. As Lorna began to demur, she said, ‘I know there are rules, but Betty insisted she wanted you to have this … and that you’d understand what she meant.’

The envelope felt light, and when Lorna opened it, a thin tissue-wrapped sliver of something dropped into her hands. She unwrapped it carefully: it was a circular silver medal, on a blue-striped red ribbon. ‘Is this Betty’s? What is it?’

‘A George Medal,’ said Kathryn. ‘Apparently, when she was just a slip of a thing, Betty ran into a Lyons Corner House that had been bombed, and dragged out two people seconds before it collapsed. Pretty impressive – they didn’t just hand those medals out to anyone.’