Nora sat at the piano, using the music to obliterate her profound loneliness. She was quite unaware that, in the time she had been there, the sun had crept away, leaving the room dark and cold; and that she had forgotten to ask cook to put back supper. Sometimes she could get away with such absent-mindedness, but things were really quite tense in the house at the moment, and artistic temperament was unlikely to be an acceptable excuse today.
Everyone seemed to be deserting her. In the room above her, her sister Lizzie was packing a trunk to take to Cornwall, as part of their parents� grand scheme for broadening their youngest child�s horizons, and getting her out of harm�s way before she took it into her head to join the older girls in blitz-battered London.
Being the youngest, Lizzie was the only one who had ever consistently treated Nora with awe; the only one whom Nora could boss around; and the only member of the family who knew even half of what went on in the lonely girl�s head. It was cruel to part them, but Nora was known to be too sensible to risk running up to London, and too conscious of her duty to remain behind as a companion to their mother.
The big grey house would be cold, and its corridors would echo more than ever. All the staff apart from cook had already deserted them, to find glory in the fields of France; and the lives of the three older sisters no longer revolved around their home village.
That afternoon at tea, Ruth had announced her engagement to Joe, in a most casual fashion, which had offended their mother. Joe had not even spoken to father; and worse than that, they meant to be married in less than a month, before Joe was posted abroad. Ruth pointed out that half the girls she knew would have married first and told their family later; in these times, one must be practical.
The height of Lady Winifred�s eyebrows was a good indicator of the perceived impropriety.
Marguerite, as usual, had been looking guilty about something. She was always the secretive one, the one with the devious plans to suit herself. Nora suspected that she engaged in manipulative games purely for her own entertainment. When they were younger, she would include Nora and Lizzie, whispering her ideas to them in the dark, after their light had been put out. More recently, though, she had chosen to treat them as children, and started confiding far more in Ruth.
And that left Audrey, who Nora had always found somewhat dauntingly boisterous, perhaps a little coarse � the sister with whom she had the least in common, and who spent the smallest amount of time at home. But Audrey had been there at tea today, horrifying everyone by having dyed her hair. She had made an inappropriate joke about gunshot weddings, and then rescued the sugar tongs when Nora clumsily dropped them. Chin up, she had whispered to her little sister, with a wink that no-one else saw.