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received a telephone call from a man, a stranger, who told her that Tim was sleeping with his wife. Confronted with the accusation that evening, Tim first denied, then admitted the affair. Jane demanded that he move out immediately. There was shouting and screaming. Overnight, black plastic bags were stuffed with clothes and belongings and tossed out windows. “I believed that Tim was a caring, family man,” Jane said. “But after nineteen years of marriage, I realized that I’d lived with someone who didn’t exist.”
    Tim acknowledged that he had been unfaithful to his wife. But rather than the sudden collapse of an apparently happy marriage, he spoke of a long, grinding slide into uncommunicativeness and antipathy. “When Jane was unhappy with something I had done, she would simply ignore me,” he said. “There would be long weekends of stony-faced silence. It went on for weeks at a time, and then it lasted for months, months on end. I was the guilty party, according to the law and according to the whole standard procedure, and no one was particularly interested in whether there’d been a history to the breakdown. I’m sure that, in the children’s eyes, I’d been the one who broke the family up. It’s not quite as black and white as that, as anyone who’s been in a similar situation would understand.”
    Jane and the three children spent an unhappy Christmas on their own in the big Edwardian house amid the unborn ghosts of future grandchildren. There was virtually no money from Tim, whose company had gone into liquidation. After the sale of their old home, Jane rented a small house, a grim brick cube in the less genteel quarters of Sevenoaks. It was a place with a history—its previous owner was Diana Goldsmith, a forty-four-year-old alcoholic who had inexplicably disappeared after dropping her children off at school. When Jane and the children moved in, the windows still carried traces of the dust that the detectives had used in their hunt for fingerprints. “The children and I used to say, ‘I hope she’s not under the bath,’” said Jane. “And it was only half a joke.”
    The following year, Diana Goldsmith’s body was found buried in a garden in Bromley; her former lover was tried but acquitted of the murder. “Everyone hated that house,” said Jane. “It was filthy dirty and had this horrible past. I’m not at all materialistic, but I like nice things which please the eye, and it offended my sense of beauty. Lucie hated that house.”
    It was her last home.

 
    2. RULES
    “A divorce makes you question everything,” said Sophie Blackman, “because the only thing you know growing up is: this is Mum, this is Dad, this is your brother and sister, and this is how you fit in. When that changes, it really does throw open the question of who you are and why you exist. Rupert was thirteen, so he cried a lot but got on with it. I was fifteen and just at that point where everything is so awkward anyway, and I didn’t know whether I was coming or going. Being seventeen, Lucie was that bit older. It wasn’t that Lucie took Mum’s side—there were no sides. But Lucie empathized with Mum, because it was Lucie who had always been like the mother to Rupert and me.”
    Sophie Blackman was the closest that I ever got to meeting Lucie Blackman in person. The two had been born less than two years apart and had lived together all their lives. Everyone who knew them commented on their striking resemblance, partly physical, but mostly the consequence of those unmistakable mannerisms and rhythms of speech that all siblings share.
    Sophie was dry, caustic, and deeply loyal. Among the people Lucie left behind, there were those who needed and depended upon her more, but I don’t think that anyone understood her as well as her sister.
    Temperamentally, though, the two were very different. Even as children, Lucie was girlish, conciliatory, and maternal, while Sophie was a stubborn, aggressive tomboy. As a