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think you’re ripping them off.” He put on a vaguely Middle Eastern accent. “ ‘Are you sure this is the correct route, Mister Driver?’ That’s why I packed it in. The agency work is less stressful. Oh, you fucking arse—”
    He pulled his wheel violently to the right, to avoid an expensive-looking car that aquaplaned in a slick of filthy water and ran into a wall. They avoided a collision, but endured another five minutes of motionlessness before the police cleared the crash.
    A bit further on and some major building work was obstructing the carriageway. The driver said a lot of London’s older buildings were being made flood-resilient—having their foundations reinforced, their lower floors lined with sandbags. They didn’t get much further on past that before they ran into a crowd of angry-looking business types and shoppers and school parties, spilling onto the roads. The driver flicked on his radio. A Flying Eye report said that the Knightsbridge tube station had had to be evacuated because of flooding. The report went on to talk about a gathering North Sea storm that was expected to bring problems to the east coast.
    The driver turned the radio off, and they waited for the blockage to clear. Lily peered out at the lines of traffic, the stalled cars and blocked roads, the miserable, sodden people splashing along the pavements, everybody trying to pursue their business. Their own fractious, short-tempered journey seemed a lot longer than just a few kilometers.

    It was a relief to reach her mother’s home, and get out of the car. Lily wasn’t sure whether to tip the driver, or how much; there seemed to have been a pulse of inflation while she’d been away. She handed him twenty pounds. He looked neither disappointed nor surprised, and drove away.
    Lily took a breath, and got her bearings. They were in Fulham, in Arneson Road, a kilometer or so north of the river. The house was one of a row of late-Victorian terraces, all heavily renovated and plastered with satellite dishes. Sandbags slumped in the small front garden, and the cellar, which had a window half-hidden by the pavement, was boarded up, evidently abandoned. Lily felt odd to be back here, after so long away. Everything seemed smaller than she remembered. She felt peculiarly glad she’d thought to bring Gary with her today, a kind of emblem of her other life.
    Gary peered up doubtfully at the house’s three floors, the PVC frames that had replaced the original sash windows. “Kind of a skinny house,” he said.
    “Skinny but deep,” Lily replied, trying to be bright.“More room than you’d think. Come on.” They walked through a low gate. A path had been cleared through sticky mud that smelled faintly of sewage. “Anyhow my mother makes the best chocolate cake in west London.”
    But it wasn’t Lily’s mother who opened the door, but her sister Amanda. And Lily learned her mother was dead.

4

    A manda walked them through the house to the kitchen. It was open-plan from the front door, and had been that way since the internal walls had been knocked down in a 1970s conversion.
    Lily glanced curiously around at the living space. Her mother’s books were gone, her slumped antique furniture vanished. The tattered old carpet Lily remembered from her childhood had been lifted too, to be replaced by cheap-looking ceramic tiles. The lower walls were bare of paint or paper, and Lily could see channels crudely cut in the plasterwork where power points had been raised to a meter or so off the ground. The fireplace, which had been blocked off in the seventies renovation, was now open again, and blackened by soot, evidently recently used.
    The small kitchen had been much less modified than the living room, and was just as cluttered as Lily remembered, though now with Amanda’s characteristic kipple, principally masses of spice bottles and jars to support her passion for Indian cooking. Amanda sat the two of them on high stools, and handed them mugs