She finds she has a natural affinity with the work. It may be born of her early care and nurturing of her siblings, her knowledge of the rhythms and demands of the everyday, her lack of fear of the human body and its functions and failures. She quickly learns the basic manual skills of nursing, the ‘obs’ – checking blood pressure, temperature and pulse – dressing wounds, lifting and bathing, administering medication and injections. Mary Sessarago watches: as she holds thin wrists, and dresses sores on withered limbs, as she feeds and walks and cajoles. Sees her willingness to stay late, to sit with the sick or the frightened, to scrub and tidy and talk. To close the eyes of those who have taken their last breaths, to lay them out. And she sees that Yvonne watches her, learning. She is not afraid of old bodies and fragile minds – not afraid of frailty, of unpredictable behaviour or capricious moods. She knows, at first, little about Yvonne’s past, but from her demeanour she decides that the younger woman’s empathy, especially for the old, must have grown from knowing fear and frailty herself.

Yvonne loves this work. She loves the plain white uniform she wears each day, the throb of blood in the veins of a wrist as she counts its beat, the puff of air in the sphygmo, the magic of mercury in a glass thermometer. She loves the person she becomes when she walks through Clinton’s door: a person without a history, who might invent herself, a whole new version, each day. This person is competent, quick, unafraid. More important, perhaps, respected. And good. She is a nurse; she tends to the ailing. Yvonne walks the halls and rooms of the old house in this woman’s skin, and starts to believe she might be real.

But the Yvonne who goes home from Clinton to Cannon Hill is still the impulsive and injured young woman, dependent on the help of her parents, her anger and shame dangerously near the surface. Everything she hides at Clinton waits for her here. One night at home, Veronica, gruff, impatient, worn down no doubt by seven children and her own forfeited dreams, finds Mimi crying on the darkened back steps of the house. Perhaps Veronica has had a bad day, perhaps she just needs her daughter to buck up, but on this night she has no sympathy to spare. For God’s sake, she barks, stop crying over a bloody man, and sends her inside to bath the twins.

My mother told me this story late in her life. It was another conversation about Veronica, how hard, how short-sighted she could be. Wedged between her words and sentences, between what she said and what I heard, was Peter’s disappearance, the old resentments about Veronica’s role, her callous indifference, as my mother saw it. By then I knew the basic facts about Peter, about Michael, but still I knew it was dangerous and distressing territory to enter, even if led. I wanted badly to know more, to ask: Did Veronica really mistake the grief of losing a child for the disappointment of losing a man? But I didn’t. By then I was more skilled at digging between the sentences, for hearing what was beneath.

And the thing was, Veronica was tough. But she wasn’t callous, and I wonder now if she was simplifying her daughter’s grief that night because she knew its real dimensions, knew how dangerous it could be. My mother was furious with her, of course – she recounted this and other stories about Veronica in bitter tones, her lips pursed – because all she could see was that, in her parents’ house, there was no room for grieving, no allowance for loss. You had to pull yourself together, get over it, get tough. Stop crying.

My mother was right: there wasn’t much allowance for loss. There was too much of it then, and Veronica had lost too – her brother Charlie to the war, her own youth, her husband’s attention, her vision of herself as a gay dog, unencumbered by the endless needs of others. But she knew that loss was everywhere; no one was spared. You had to count your blessings. Her daughter had made her bed and would have to lie in it.