Case Histories

Before her interview she imagined walking through those selfsame gardens, admiring the beautiful herbaceous border, discussing Middlemarch and War and Peace with an earnest new friend or being punted along the river by some handsome, no-good medical student, being someone that people wanted to know – "Oh, look, there's Amelia Land. Let's go and talk to her. She's so interesting" (or "such good fun," or "very pretty," or even "absolutely outrageous"), but it hadn't worked out like that at all. Her interview at Newnham was mortifying – they were kind, concerned even, treating her like she was slightly sick, or suffering a disability, but they asked her questions about works and authors she had never heard of. Worse than Spenser and Pope, now it was Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia and Ruskin's Unto This Last. It wasn't what Amelia thought of as literature. Literature was big books (Middletnarch and War and Peace) that you could fall in love with and lose yourself in forever. And so she'd ended up at a far-flung, mediocre redbrick with no intellectual cachet but where at least they let you write long essays about your love affair with Middlemarch and War and Peace.

Julia came back into the kitchen and poured more gin. She was getting on Amelia's nerves. "I thought you were having a bath," she said irritably.

"I am. Who rattled your cage?"

"No one."

Amelia took her tea through to the living room and turned the television on. Sammy joined her on the sofa. There was some kind of celebrity reality show on. She didn't know who any of the "celebrities" were and there didn't seem to be anything real about the predicaments they found themselves in. She didn't want to go to bed, didn't want to sleep in Sylvia's cold bedroom that caught the light from the street lamp outside and had damp creeping down the walls from the roof. Maybe she could move into the guest bedroom? To Amelia's knowledge no one had ever slept in it. Would it call down a curse on her head from their mother? If their mother was a ghost, not that Amelia believed in ghosts, she thought the guest bedroom would be where she would take up residence. She imagined her lying on the narrow bed, its white coverlet now spotted with mold, lazing away her days with magazines and boxes of chocolates, discarding the wrappers on the floor now that she was no longer in thrall to housework. And what about Olivia's room, could Amelia bear to sleep in there? Could she lie in that small bed and stare at the peeling nursery-rhyme wallpaper and not feel her heart break?

Who took Olivia? Did Victor come creeping across the grass in the night and dig her out of the tent with his big shovel hands while Amelia slept? Her own father? Why not? It happened all the time, didn't it? And did he keep Blue Mouse as some terrible souvenir? Or was there a more innocent explanation (but what?).

They had always found refuge in thinking of Olivia living a different life somewhere else, rather than being dead. For years and years the three of them had woven a story for Olivia – snatched in the night by a figure very like the Snow Queen, only kind and loving and coming from a more temperate kingdom. This empyreal creature had been desperate for a little girl of her own and had chosen Olivia because she was perfect in every way. The fictional Olivia was brought up in the most luxurious paradise their girlish imaginations could conceive of- wrapped in silks and furs, fed on cakes and sweets, surrounded by dogs and kittens and (for some reason) peacocks, bathing in golden baths and sleeping in silver beds. And although they knew Olivia was happy in her new life they believed that one day she would be allowed to return home – which was always the unquestionable consummation of this wishful narrative.

As they grew, so did Olivia, and it was only when Julia reached adolescence (her hormones releasing enough energy to power a small town) that Olivia's other, fabulous life faded away. Yet it was so strongly embedded in Amelia's consciousness that even now she found it difficult to believe that Olivia might actually be dead and not a thirty-seven-year-old woman living in an Arcadian bower somewhere.

Julia came into the living room and squashed herself onto the sofa between Amelia and Sammy, where there was clearly no room for her. "Go away," Amelia said to her. Julia produced a bar of chocolate and broke a piece off for Amelia and a piece for the dog.

"I mean, it's not impossible that Olivia's still alive," Julia said, as if she had been listening to Amelia's thoughts (what a horrible idea). "Perhaps she was kidnapped by someone who wanted a child, and they brought her up as their own, so she forgot about us, forgot she was Olivia, just thought she was someone else, say… Charlotte -"

" Charlotte?"