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time to sell Salix House and move to London.’
    The kitchen around Eva seemed to shrink and then stretch as though she were in some mad version of
Alice in Wonderland
. It took a while for her brain to arrange the words in her mouth but at last she said, ‘And what will happen to me?’
    ‘To you?’ Rowena seemed genuinely puzzled. ‘You’ll move to London too, of course. We’ll find you a lovely little flat, very near us. Or maybe we’ll get a house which has a granny flat already as part of the property. Or you could go into sheltered housing, if you’d prefer to do that. You won’t be put anywhere you don’t want to go, Ma. I promise you that.’
    ‘I don’t feel as though—’
    ‘As though what?’ Rowena was frowning.
    ‘As though I’ve been properly consulted.’
    ‘Oh, Ma, how can you say that? We’ve spoken about this dozens of times. You know we have. Whenever we’ve spoken about it I’ve tried to find out what you think, but you don’t want to know. You just change the subject and hope the whole problem will go away.’
    That was true. She
didn’t
want to know. ‘I wish there was a way I could truly not know!’ she said. ‘I can’t bear the thought of—’
    ‘You’ll soon get used to somewhere else, you know,’ Conor said helpfully. The man was a fool. Eva debated saying so and thought better of it. To her it was obvious. How could she leave Salix House when every room, every corner of every room, every picture, every plant in the garden, was like a part of herself? She and Antoine had built it up from the ruin it was when they first saw it more than forty years ago, into something different. Unusual. Not like any other house she’d ever seen. She loved it, but that wasn’t the only reason she didn’t want to leave it. She felt bound to the house by ties that no other person would understand. No one could. She was attached to it by things that were (how could she express this even to herself?) more than physical. Ties of guilt and shame and memories. Things had happened here, words had been spoken here that had entwined themselves into her soul and Eva felt unable to imagine leaving. She couldn’t say this to Conor and Rowena. To them, Salix House was a property. There would be other properties somewhere else. She understood that, but she would find it hard, to say the least, if they sold it and banished her, exiled her to another home altogether.
    ‘Well,’ she said, finally, ‘just because the house is yours technically, that doesn’t mean it’s yours
emotionally
. You must see that I still think of it as mine. Even though it’s not.’
    Rowena sighed. ‘Ma, we can do this the hard way, or the easy way. It was a wonderful thing you did, passing the ownership of the house to us.’
    ‘I only did it to avoid death duties,’ Eva said. ‘I didn’t realize anything like this was going to happen.’
    ‘But you must be able to see why it is, Ma,’ Rowena was trying to be calm and speak kindly but she was, Eva knew, getting more and more exasperated. ‘I’ve told you. We’ll find you a really good place to live. How could you think that we wouldn’t? But Salix House is no longer viable. You must see that.’
    No longer viable
. There was nothing to say to that. Rowena and Conor had come to live at Salix House when Dee was born. In those days, neither of them was earning a great deal. They had a tiny flat in Amersham and when Eva proposed that they move in with her, they accepted at once. The burden of childcare was shared and it made Eva happy to have a baby in the house. The irony wasn’t lost on her. She’d been terrified throughout Rowena’s early childhood, but this little scrap of a girl was different. After Bridie was born, Eva made up her mind that here were two sisters who’d be friends for ever and she made every effort to encourage them to like one another, to do things together. And it’s worked, she thought. They get on beautifully. How will it be if