Chapter 2

with a faint crack cross the middle, the lines of which Kate knew off by heart. only the people inside the house changed, though Kate half hoped they would not.

The house belonged to Kate's uncle and aunt. Her uncle Charles had been born here the eldest of two boys and now he lived in the house with his family. Charles was married to Bella, who was Kate's mother's sister. Kate had fitted these things together in her head when she was about five, like an intricate jigsaw. she was part of the jigsaw which made her feel safe, because there were holes in the rest of her life; absences and blank bits and places that fell away into nothing.

Her uncle and aunt had built a family as apparently symmetrical as their house: boy, girl, boy, girl-two years between each raven-haired child. Paul was the oldest; then came Isabel,julian and Harriet. Julian was the same age as Kate, though he was bigger than her. But when she went to stay with her cousins, she shared the girls' bedroom with Isabel and Harriet, tucked into a truckle bed between the two of them, safe inside clean, freshly ironed linen sheets. Truckle. That was a word Kate learnt the summer that she was seven, when she spent the holidays in the house though, years later, she wondered if her memory of that summer was somehow flawed, like the willow pattern plate. Her mother had explained that they were separating. Kate remembered that the sound of the world, how it fell apart into bits (and how was it that the plate did not separate, but held together, despite its cracks? ) . At first Kate thought she meant that the three of them this already too small family were separating from each other, severed.