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sense, does it?’
    ‘No, I suppose it doesn’t.’ Kate had the distinct feeling she was on the losing side. ‘But perhaps the house could be sold and transported? I mean to destroy all that beauty . . . The woodwork, the lead-lighting, the stained-glass panelled doors . . .’
    ‘The house is not in a fit enough state to be transported, Kate – we must be realistic.’ Stan was no longer belligerent; there was no need. The battle was over. ‘And I didn’t say we were
destroying
it my dear, I said we were
demolishing
it. There is a distinct difference.’
    ‘And that is . . .?’
    ‘The house will be dismantled. The features you mention are worth a great deal these days. The timber alone will fetch a fine price.’ Stan threw in the clincher. ‘The house is of far more value in pieces than it is whole, I’m afraid.’
    ‘I see.’ There was nothing Kate could say to that.
    Hilda couldn’t help but feel a sense of disappointment as she witnessed her daughter’s acquiescence. She hadn’t expected Kate to win the battle certainly, but she’d expected her to offer a more forceful opposition. Surely Kate could have taken a stronger stand, given everything the house represented: the past, Grandmother Ellie and Big Jim, the great love they’d shared . . . She looked about the drawing room.
    ‘More tea?’ she offered. ‘Neil, Alan, you must surely be ready for another cup.’
    Kate was aware that she’d disappointed her mother. It was regrettable, but inevitable. She would certainly have done battle for the house on aesthetic grounds if its preservation had been practicable, but she could not fight for its symbolic significance the way she knew her mother would have liked. Unlike Hilda she was not a romantic. She probably never had been. As a little girl, her mother’s stories of Grandmother Ellie and the past had enchanted her. But then so too had fairy tales. She’d long since grown up, and more and more these days she’d come to realise that, although she loved her mother dearly, Hilda Durham lived in a fantasy world.
    ‘Well that’s it,’ Stan said, clapping his hands together loudly by way of a finale, ‘family meeting’s over. Let’s call Ivy in: we need more cake.’
    That night, shortly before dinner, Kate visited her mother in the upstairs sitting room that was Hilda’s personal domain. She was seated as usual by the window that looked out over the balcony and the rear garden, browsing through a copy of
Tatler
, her dry sherry digestive on the coffee table next to her.
    ‘Do come in, darling,’ she said, putting down the magazine.
    Kate entered and pulled up a chair beside her mother’s. ‘I’m sorry, Marmee.’ It was the name they’d adopted by mutual consent when, aged ten, Kate had first read Louisa May Alcott’s
Little Women
. Hilda loved the way her daughter called her Marmee.
    ‘Good heavens, what on earth are you sorry for?’
    ‘For disappointing you as I did.’
    ‘But my clever, clever, Kate, how could you possibly disappoint me?’ Hilda appeared bemused. ‘I am so very proud of you.’
    ‘Old Elianne House,’ Kate prompted. Her mother seemed to have forgotten.
    ‘Ah yes. That.’ Hilda gave a slight shrug and looked out the window. ‘You wouldn’t have won, anyway.’
    ‘I know.’ Kate sensed that her mother wasn’t really seeing the balcony, or the gardens stretched out below.
    ‘How sad to think that a symbol of such love should be sold off piecemeal,’ Hilda said quietly, more to herself than to Kate.
    ‘Yes, I suppose it is.’ She’s not here at all, Kate thought, she’s off somewhere in the past again.
    Kate had spent her childhood wondering why her mother dwelt so much in the past. Was it in order to escape the present? But her mother led an extremely comfortable life, so why the need for escape? Then two years previously, and for some unfathomable reason Kate associated the occasion with her sixteenth birthday, the thought had suddenly struck her. It