The colours of her homecoming are red and black. This is Ann’s memory, vivid, frightening: her sister’s hair, too straight, too black, her red dress too red for the sadness all around her as she stumbles from the train, alone. No baby. Ann looks past Mimi to the carriage door, as if Peter might appear with one of the other passengers smiling with the relief of arrival. But there is no Peter, only Mimi who is not smiling, who subsides against their mother and sobs. Ann can hardly bear to listen to the noise that she can only think of as thin, because that is what her sister is, everything about her is thin, her face, her arms, even her lips. When she stops crying she presses them tightly together, as if she is afraid of what might happen if she opens those lips again. She kisses everyone thinly. Then they take her home. But she’s not there long; the next day they take her to see a doctor and she doesn’t come back.

She lies in a hospital bed and feels her future draining into her past. She is helpless before it; has become a mere onlooker, a witness to her own life, the high steel bed at once her prison and her grandstand. The word of the doctors binds her: she must lie here if she wants this baby inside her to survive, if she herself wants to survive. There are nights, edged hard with grief, with a loathing for her own traitorous flesh, when she would choose not to live. No one else seems to see the bargain that’s been made: the new baby for the one lost. Every day she lies here motionless, saving this baby’s life, is another day she isn’t saving Peter. Fighting for him. By obeying the doctors, she is disobeying her own heart.

She isn’t surprised when her daughter is born early and tiny at the end of March, 1950; a female replica of her son, with a shock of dark hair. Yvonne’s struggling kidneys keep them both in hospital for another month, but there is no hurry to get home. There is no home, no husband, no little boy, nothing, despite the wedding band on her finger, despite the changes to her name, her body, to virtually every aspect of her life.

She names the baby Sharon Elaine. Sharon for the rose. Elaine for no one we know about. But here is my guess: she has anglicised the Greek name Elena. This is the name she called Sharon, playfully, all her life. Elaina. A pet name. A name to stamp a child with a history, an oblique but insistent connection with her father. With her brother. It’s not so strange. The marriage is over, that much is clear, but still she is mourning the potential of it, of all her dreams. Here is a new child, flesh of their flesh, who should have been part of the life they might have had. So perhaps the name is a kind of talisman, for Sharon, for herself. A lure that will bring Peter back.