Daughterhood by Alison Irvine sampler

Alison Irvine is the author of the novels Cat Step and This
Road is Red. Cat Step was a Guardian Readers’ Book of the
Year, A BBC Radio 4 Open Book Editor’s Choice and an iNews
Best Book for Christmas. This Road is Red was shortlisted for
the Saltire First Book of the Year Award. Her non-fiction book
Barrowland: the inside story of Glasgow’s beloved ballroom was
published in 2025. Alison is the writer in the artist collective
Recollective alongside photographer Chris Leslie and illustrator
Mitch Miller. Born in London to Antipodean parents, she lives
in Glasgow with her family.

By the same author:
Fiction
This Road is Red (Luath Press) 2011
Cat Step (Dead Ink Books) 2020
Non-fiction
Barrowland: the inside story of Glasgow’s beloved ballroom
(Luath Press) 2025
with Recollective
Nothing is Lost (Freight Design) 2015
Barrowland Ballads (Graphical House) 2019
Concrete Dreams: the Rise and Fall of Cumbernauld Town
Centre (Graphical House) 2024

Daughterhood
ALISON IRVINE

First published 2026
isbn: 978-1-80425-276-5
The author’s right to be identified as author of this book
under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
has been asserted.
This book is made of materials from well-managed,
FSC®-certified forests and other controlled sources.
Printed and bound by
Ashford Colour Ltd, Gosport
Typeset in 10.5 point Sabon by
Main Point Books, Edinburgh
© Alison Irvine, 2026

‘So each had a private little sun for her soul to bask in; some
dream, some affection, some hobby, or at least some remote
and distant hope…’
Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles

For Claire

Prologue
An Elopement
Nina was to slip outside and meet him. ‘Take only what fits in a
bag,’ he said. ‘A toothbrush. A book. Whatever. You don’t need
money. It’s time. Slip outside, as if you’re popping to the shops.
I’ll get you. I love you.’
The fact that he’d telephoned the house was staggering. Nina
cupped her hand around the mouthpiece and said, ‘I love you.
Where are we going?’
She heard the smile in his voice as he said, ‘I’ll find somewhere.
It doesn’t matter. I need you, Nina. We need each other. It’s time.’
Nina told Mr Stone she would meet him at the bus stop at six,
then went into the bedroom she shared with her sister and began
to pack. Toothbrush. Knickers. She found perfume and a hairbrush
and packed them too, leaving behind her school uniform,
washed and folded for posterity, and the piles of notebooks in
which his handwriting annotated her essays.
Patrick Stone’s face and fingers and lips devoured her as she lay
on her back in her bed, waiting for six o’clock. She felt moved,
wild, light, as if she might sing or cry out. She looked around her
bedroom with its posters and wall clock and two desks side by
side and expected she’d see everything differently the next time
she was there.
When her sister came in to play a record, Nina closed the door,
sat beside her on her bed and told her everything.
9

1
A Close Family
Nina had reached a time in her life when there seemed little
to look forward to and much to regret ever having happened.
Thinking hard about it one day, she concluded that
life had kinked around the age of sixteen and never straightened
out. Events from decades ago preoccupied her. Stealing
from the newsagent, for example, was a pity. Going with her
schoolfriends to the barracks and letting herself be felt up by
soldiers barely older than herself was a little reckless. And it was
startling to believe she was the same girl who’d gone on stage
in the school play without rehearsal, filling in for someone in
the mime scene who was off sick. Her audacity, her foolishness!
Patrick Stone still gave her little fingernail marks in her palms,
although he was different and she’d always be glad of him. But
it was hard to take risks in the present knowing the ludicrous
risks she’d taken in the past had led to nothing, only a sense
that she’d got everything so damn wrong. Now, aged forty-six,
with the menopause pestering her like a clanking door in a gale,
she wasn’t sure how to proceed.
Fortunately, her sister was coming back and this was momentous.
Six months was too long when you were a close family
with little need for friends. The days had passed, and Nina had
pined, and replied appropriately to messages showing photographs
of Kate by a lake or up a glacier or on the land that was
their father’s ramshackle farm. He went to school barefoot, he
used to tell them. ‘At least you girls had shoes.’
Two great-aunts fist-fighting on that same farm, just west of
Auckland, were the only other sisters in the family. Nina remembered
a scrap in a bungalow bedroom with rain falling outside the
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Alison Irvine
window. Great-Aunty Juliet came around the bed to hit Great-
Aunty Sarah and the women’s voices were high and loud. As she
and her sister were lifted out of the room, Nina watched over
her shoulder. Her aunts’ necks were swans’ necks and their arms
ferocious, slapping wings.
That was Nina’s only trip to New Zealand. ‘Never fight with your
sister. She’s all you’ll have when we’re dead,’ Nina’s mother told
them from then on. They called her Reenie now; neither sister
could say why. Apart from the time they cracked a mirror from
a misthrown hardback and other moments of meanness, like the
day Kate stole Nina’s diary then quoted from it – loudly, from the
top of the stairs – the sisters had got on. They were awfully close.
Their great-aunts were the same. Ostensibly, the fight in the
bungalow bedroom was over the goodbye presents, saved for
the young sisters’ return to London and given at the wrong time,
according to Aunty Juliet. But the older women were most likely
distraught at the fracturing of their little family. The children were
returning to London, back to that cold, dirty place, and they’d been
home for such a brief time. It was doubtful the great-aunts would
ever see them again, given air fares and the family’s general lack
of means, so, in anguish, they turned on each other.
‘Oh, Kate, I’ve missed you,’ Nina said at the traffic lights. They
were through the airport and done with the first exchanges of
love and compliments. As she’d hoped, the edge she’d teetered
close to for six months had disappeared as soon as she’d seen
her sister waving her bangled arms, looking healthy and reassuringly
strong, and smiling as if the arrivals mêlée was for her
homecoming alone. Nina leaned over – stretched her seatbelt
right out – and put her palms on her sister’s knees. She’d have
bent to kiss them if she could have reached that far.
Kate patted her back. ‘Watch the lights, Sister,’ she said.
‘Do you want to stop for breakfast?’ Nina said after she’d
straightened up and driven off.
12

daughterhood
‘Just keep going. Thanks for getting me. I was dreading coming
back.’
‘I was dreading you not coming back. Are you tired?’
Kate rubbed her eyes. ‘I don’t know. I wish I felt glad to be
home.’
When Nina frowned and said, ‘Hmm,’ Kate said, ‘But you’re
here.’
‘Yes, still here.’
The motorway traffic moved slowly and thickly. Cool air
hissed from the car’s air conditioning vents. Nina overtook a
lorry and returned to the inside lane. She switched on the radio
and heard the voice of their mother’s favourite presenter.
‘How is she?’ Kate asked.
‘Reenie? Oh, no better. Worse, actually.’
On summer days, Reenie used to tan her legs as she drove,
pulling her skirt up to her thighs, letting the sun stream through
the window to brown them. Now she sat in the dark in her bedroom.
She certainly didn’t drive.
Nina said, ‘We should phone in and get the DJ to say a message.
Reenie, your daughters are on their way to see you. Get
out of bed.’
Kate said, ‘Yeah. Enough’s enough, you weirdo.’
‘Pack it in, Reenie.’
‘Bit bat-shit, Reenie.’
‘Stop it, I can’t see the road for laughing. I’m crying.’ Nina
wiped her eyes.
Kate yawned. ‘I guess I am tired.’ She laughed and yawned
again. ‘And Phoebe?’
Nina paused to choose her words even though she’d expected
the question. ‘I’ve messaged. I’ve phoned. Nothing.’
Kate shook her head and said, ‘My thankless child.’
It was perplexing that they’d heard completely nothing from
Phoebe while Kate had been away. It was assumed, in Nina’s head
anyway, that Phoebe’s issues were with her mother only, and
with her mother gone, she might have softened and dropped in.
13

Alison Irvine
The traffic was relentless, with drivers overtaking and undertaking
and sidling into gaps between Nina’s car and the one
ahead. Nina thought they would have talked more on the drive
home – she wanted to tell Kate about Patrick Stone – but her
sister really did seem tired. After looking out of the window
for a time, Kate asked after Russ, their dad, and Sylvie, Nina’s
stepdaughter, then said, ‘How can you drive in this traffic?’ But
Nina was content to drive. The car was paid off. It never gave
her any trouble.
When everything slowed and stilled and they stopped in four
lanes of traffic, Nina pulled on the handbrake and sat back in her
seat. Industrial London was all around them; sloping warehouse
roofs and pylons and lorry parks. Above them, a metal gantry
flashed a warning of long delays.
‘Dad’s bought a quarter of a boat,’ Nina said.
‘A quarter of a boat? Which quarter?’
‘A one-Saturday-a-month quarter. Unless they share and all
sail together. Which they often do.’
‘Well.’ Kate shook her head. ‘Does he keep it on the reservoir?’
‘He does.’
‘What does Reenie think of that?’
‘She doesn’t appear to care one way or the other.’
‘Have you been on it?’
‘I said I’d wait for you.’
‘Of course you did.’
‘Uh-huh.’ Nina shrugged and put the car into first.
She drove them back by way of the reservoirs to avoid the
traffic. The A10 off the M25 took them to Enfield and then all
they needed to do was follow the road over the canal and carry on
past the flats where the palladium once stood. Theirs was an odd
little corner of the city. The canal acted like an arrow shooting
into the heart of London – or East London, at least, where the
towers of Canary Wharf stood. Swans and waterfowl brought
bird watchers, the neighbouring reservoirs brought sailors and
school groups, and all around the water lay urbanity. Houses.
14

daughterhood
Factories. Roads. Retail. The Polmonts lived in separate houses
a little further out into suburbia. The best of both worlds, they
always said. Close to the city but beside the trees.
Nina thought they might glimpse the boats on the reservoirs,
but she’d forgotten there was nothing to see from the roadside.
All they got was a bank of grass topped by a metal fence.
‘I can take you straight home if you’re tired.’
‘I’d like to see them.’
‘They’ll be pleased to see you. And don’t worry about Reenie.
She really is fine. She’s peculiar. That’s all she is.’
Their parents’ street had been retarmacked while Kate was in
New Zealand. Spindly trees hung onto spring blossoms. The road
was sometimes used as a cut-through, but speed bumps helped
calm the traffic and it was a decent street. Their parents knew
their neighbours well enough to take each other’s bins in from
time to time. Russ opened the front door with a smile.
‘The eagle has landed! Back from the homeland. Come in, my
girls, come in.’
They hugged with vigour and questions, to which Kate
answered, ‘I did see the old farm, but there’s nothing there – it’s a
field!’ and Russ said, ‘It’s all it ever was. I’m tip-top, Katy, tip-top.’
Kate inspected him and said, ‘You are tip-top, aren’t you, Dad?
You look better.’ They were alike around the eyes. Nina watched
them, saw the joy in her dad’s busy face and felt she could finally
relax.
‘Your sister’s going to cry,’ Russ said to Kate. ‘Come on, let’s
get you in. Your mother’s upstairs.’
Nina pushed the door shut and switched on a light.
‘Hi Reenie,’ Kate shouted and put her coat over the banister.
Nina saw her checking the house for changes, but there were
none. The carpet remained a little threadbare on the bottom step
of the stairs, a lightbulb was out in the candelabra lightshade,
but the family photograph and framed seascape print were still
on the wall.
15

Alison Irvine
Russ rubbed his hands together. ‘What now? Drink? Rest?
Newspaper?’
Reenie’s voice sounded from upstairs. ‘I live here too, you
know!’
‘Go on up to your mother.’ He leaned a hand on the wall,
smiled again and blinked a couple of the quick blinks he gave
when he was nervous.
As they were climbing the stairs, Nina said, ‘Put some eggs on
to boil, will you, Dad?’ That would give him something to do. He
looked forlorn standing in the hall, held up by the wall. It was
only with Kate back in the house that Nina saw the full oddness
of their parents’ situation. He oughtn’t to be standing alone in
the hall with all that good health on his face, his bright ageing
contrasting with their mother’s eccentric retreat.
‘I’m coming for you, Reenie!’ Kate opened the bedroom door and
crawled across the bed into Reenie’s outstretched arms.
‘Watch your feet on the covers. Take your shoes off,’ Reenie
said.
‘Let me hug you.’
‘Oh, you can hug me. Look at you, all filled out and young
again.’
Kate took off her trainers, dropped them on the floor and got
under the covers, next to Reenie. ‘Glad to have me back?’ she
said, and they hugged and Reenie closed her eyes. Her skin was
grey compared with Kate’s tanned face.
‘Your sister never gets in bed with me.’
‘You’ve not been very touchy-feely recently,’ Nina said.
‘Oh, my girls.’
Kate kissed Reenie’s forehead and Reenie smiled and Nina
smiled too.
Nina opened the curtains and looked out at the last of the
cherry blossom on the tree in the garden. She sat on a chair by
the window and studied her mother and sister.
‘So, you had a good time,’ Reenie said.
16

daughterhood
‘A proper good time. I needed it.’
‘And now you’re home.’
‘Now she’s home,’ Nina said. ‘And we can all relax.’
She heard her dad’s music from down the stairs. Her sister
was so much more like their dad in looks and character but
more at ease with their mum; she always had been. Nina on the
other hand would never get in bed with their mother, it was true,
but she would peel vegetables in the kitchen with their father in
silence quite happily.
‘Have you been outside today?’ Kate said.
‘Today!’ Nina laughed.
‘No, I have not,’ Reenie said.
‘Have you been downstairs?’
‘No.’ She put her hands in her lap. ‘That’s a lie, I went once,
I can’t remember why, but I didn’t like it.’
‘Today or ever?’
‘I go at night-time.’
‘Well, that’s a waste.’
Kate held Reenie’s hands and ran her thumb over the rings on
her fingers. She patted her shoulder and stroked her hair. Nina
could see she was checking Reenie for unkemptness, but there
was none. Reenie changed out of her pyjamas each day into
tracksuit bottoms and zip-up hoodies. She’d stopped wearing
make-up, but she brushed her hair and cleansed her face. There
was a pot of hand cream at her side of the bed.
‘Does Dad still sleep in here?’ Kate asked.
‘He’s in the other room most nights. Comes in when he wants
something.’
Nina shook her head when Kate looked at her.
‘Have you seen a doctor?’
‘I don’t need a doctor.’
‘I thought you’d been referred.’
‘I haven’t missed your questions.’
‘That wasn’t a question.’
Nina wanted to say to Kate that their mother’s upstairs living
17

Alison Irvine
took a little adjusting to. When you were away from it, it was
easy to imagine it wasn’t so bad. Their mum had always been
odd. Perhaps she hadn’t coped well with Kate being away. Nina
hadn’t.
Kate moved herself to the edge of the bed. ‘I’m giving you a
fortnight, Reenie, and if you’re not up on your feet and back in
the world, it’s to the doctor you must go. It’s not fair on Dad.’
‘Russ is quite happy.’
‘It’s not fair on you.’
‘I’m quite happy.’
‘It’s not fair on us then. On Nina. Look at her!’
‘What’s wrong with me? I’m quite happy too.’ Nina stood
up, caught sight of her face in her mother’s mirror and thought
she looked old. She remembered the eggs her father was boiling
downstairs and said, ‘Let’s eat. We’ll bring you up some egg
mayonnaise.’
‘She’s perfectly able to come down and get it herself.’
‘Bye-bye daughters. Close the door on your way out.’
‘Two weeks, Reenie.’
‘My girls.’
They got outside the door. Kate rested her forehead against
Nina’s shoulder. Nina patted her back.
Their dad stood at the sink, looking out at the garden. The eggs
rattled as they boiled. The kitchen was becoming more like him
and less like Reenie. There were piles of envelopes and newspapers
and jars of herbs on the worktop. He’d moved his CD
player from the lounge into the kitchen because, he said, he liked
to drink whisky and listen to Rod Stewart, sitting on one of the
high stools and stirring a pot or looking out of the window. Nina
took the saucepan of eggs from the stove and put it in the sink
and ran the cold tap.
‘She’s happiest with her own company, knowing that I’m here,’
he said when Kate started with her questions.
‘Do you speak at all?’
18

daughterhood
‘When she wants to.’
‘She chatted away to us.’
‘You’re not me.’
‘How can you stand it? I couldn’t put up with that.’
Nina tapped an egg against a chopping board and then picked
at the cracked shell. Kate put up with nothing, she’d always been
like that, whereas Nina and the other Polmonts were a little more
circumspect, a little more accepting of life’s difficulties.
Kate said, ‘She seems to be getting worse. You probably can’t
see it. I’ve been away. I have fresh eyes.’
‘Oh, I can see it,’ Nina said.
‘Want to see a picture of my boat?’
‘Yes, show us your boat,’ Kate said.
Their father whistled. He took a white envelope from the top
of a pile of papers. His fingers dug for the envelope’s folded lip.
Then he tipped the contents onto the worktop and picked up a
photograph.
‘Belle,’ he said.
The sisters were quiet as they looked at a very ordinary-seeming
boat.
‘No engine. Just the jib and mainsail.’
‘Can you afford it?’
‘Nina, have you missed this girl’s questions?’
‘It’s who she is.’
‘Yes, I can afford it.’
It was a nice enough boat with two red sails.
‘Who else owns it?’ Kate said.
‘Two of the drivers, and Claudia.’
‘Who’s Claudia?’
‘She was on the Northern Line too.’
‘She’s retired now?’
‘We’re all retired.’
He told them Belle was a beauty and it made sense to go quarters
with trusted friends. They would quarter the insurance and
quarter the cost of the upkeep. None of them wanted anything
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Alison Irvine
fancy, they just wanted to sail her across the water or sit in her
on a calm day and feel her float.
‘And that’s all you want? A reservoir?’ Kate said.
The reservoir was quiet enough but all around it there were
roads. Didn’t he want the sea, is what Kate meant. He did want
the sea, Nina knew. But he gestured towards the ceiling and said,
‘Your mother,’ and it was clear he didn’t feel he could put the
boat on a trailer and pull it to the Suffolk or Essex coast where
there was actual sea.
‘Water’s water. Doesn’t matter where I am.’ He put the photograph
and paperwork back into the envelope.
He’d tried to send them to the Sea Cadets when they were
teenagers, because he’d sailed as a boy in New Zealand – it
wasn’t a rich hobby in New Zealand – and because of Moses,
his great-grandfather.
‘You should have grown up loving rugby and sailing and you
love neither,’ he said, which was what he always said with mildness.
He took some bread to butter.
‘But we love you, Dad,’ Kate said, and Nina said, ‘Yes, we do.’
Russ paused in his laying out of the bread to smile. There were
no tissues in the kitchen. Nina searched in a pocket. She’d slept
little the previous night and everything was making her cry. ‘Our
Kate’s back,’ she said. Nothing seemed difficult when she had her
sister near her and it was easier to feel the big emotions. Like
love. She and Kate had both lived lives, god, hadn’t they just, but
in that moment in the kitchen, they were teenagers again. It was
a little different with Reenie upstairs instead of beside them, yet
there were echoes of their old, steady lives as they sat on stools
and prepared the sandwiches. It was the calmest Nina had felt
in months. She almost recognised herself.
Their dad spread butter and Nina mashed mayonnaise into
the eggs.
‘New Zealand’s beautiful, isn’t it?’ Kate said.
‘You’ll have seen far more than I ever did. Did you get to Raglan?’
‘I did get to Raglan.’
20

daughterhood
Russ slid a plate of buttered bread towards Nina. His knuckle
joints looked sore. He said it didn’t interfere with the working
of the ropes on a boat, but Nina wasn’t sure she believed him.
‘Did you get to Moses Polmont’s bay?’
‘I did. I took a boat out to the island.’
They were all descendants of Moses Polmont, who had travelled
by whaling ship from Nantucket to Christchurch and, once
settled, sailed locals to and from an island as a money-making
venture. His whisky-distilling venture had sent him to prison
– the barrels were not ballast, the judge concluded – but Russ
liked to remember him not for his imprisonment but for the sea
journeys he made across oceans. He told them he used to apologise
to Moses, on bad days, when he journeyed the length of
the Northern line and back again, through the same tunnels and
signals, concentrating as hard as a skipper in a storm but gaining
none of the benefits of a sea voyage. On bad days, Nina thought
they’d all let Moses Polmont down. He would have disapproved
of her lack of passion. He would have preferred the audacious girl
who stepped onstage into a scene that wasn’t hers or who took
on the thrills and mischief of the young soldiers at the barracks.
Kate opened her rucksack. ‘These are for you,’ she said to Nina
and Russ. ‘They’re paintings. I’ll get them framed. I met an artist.’
The sand in the pictures was black, the light on the water gold.
‘You’ve been there?’ Nina said.
‘I’ve stood on that beach.’
Their dad clapped his hands. ‘That’s Raglan!’ He felt around
his neck for his glasses, put them on and held his painting in his
outstretched hands. ‘Beautiful,’ he said.
Kate said, ‘I’d never seen black sand before.’
‘Nothing like it.’ In the silence while they looked at the paintings
Russ said, ‘Does that daughter of yours know you’re home?’
Phoebe. Nina hated to see the stricken look in her sister’s eyes.
‘No,’ Kate said. She placed the paintings between their protective
cards. ‘I got her one too. I’ll leave it here in case she calls in.’
‘She doesn’t call in,’ their dad said. He looked at Nina.
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Alison Irvine
‘No,’ Nina said. ‘Nothing from me.’
‘You’ll be desperate to see her,’ Russ said.
‘I don’t have the words right now, Dad.’
Out of habit, Nina presumed, they all turned to the fridge to
look at a photograph of Phoebe. She sat behind a cake, her face
glowing in the glare of eighteen candles, just a few months before
she’d begun to drift away from them and complain about her
mother being an unsuitable role model. The girl’s face contained
all of them; all the Polmonts. Perhaps they’d expected too much
of her, and perhaps she’d felt that.
Kate said she would take a look at the cherry blossom and
Russ followed her outside, saying his sailing shorts should be
ready to come in off the line because the weather was so warm
and windy. Nina forgot to ask if Kate wanted pepper on her egg
mayonnaise so she put it on anyway and made up the sandwiches,
leaving the door to the garden open.
Reenie was pleased with her sandwich. She licked her fingers
and dabbed at the plate, putting crumbs finger by finger onto
her tongue.
‘Your father makes a good sandwich, I’ll give him that,’ she
said. ‘Tell Kate I’m over the moon she’s back.’
Nina looked out of the window and saw Kate and Russ sitting
on the bench under the cherry tree.
‘They’re outside eating their sandwiches,’ Nina said. ‘I wonder
what they’re talking about.’
‘Neither you nor me,’ said Reenie.
The visit over, back in Nina’s car, Kate buckled her seatbelt and
put her hands to her forehead. ‘Blimey. You need your strength
for that pair. I hoped she would have been better.’
‘She’s worse,’ Nina said and started the car. ‘You can see how
I’ve missed you. Six months is a long time. There’s a lot to tell
you.’
They drove to the end of the road.
‘Nina, pull over.’
22

daughterhood
Nina did as her sister asked. She kept the engine running. Then
she turned it off when Kate didn’t speak. She expected she would
talk about Phoebe, the wayward daughter.
‘I wanted to tell you this on the motorway.’
‘You were quiet on the motorway.’
‘I was tired.’
‘I have news too. We didn’t get long enough. You go first,’
Nina said.
Kate faced Nina. ‘I’m not staying. I’m going back to New
Zealand.’
This, Nina was not expecting.
‘Why?’
‘I’ve fallen in love.’
Nina should have said wonderful things. She should have
expressed delight. What she did say eventually was, ‘What about
Phoebe?’ to which Kate said, ‘I can’t wait for Phoebe any more.’
It had been a long day. This was too much. Nina thought
about her mother upstairs in her bedroom and her father on his
own in the kitchen collecting the eggshells to put in the garden to
keep the slugs off his plants, and her niece away goodness knows
where, and could have cried for them all.
Kate yawned a loud and long yawn. ‘I know, I know. It’s a big
change. You’ll like him, Nina. He’s got a soft soul. He’s creative.
He’s good for me. He’s one of us.’
‘Did he paint the pictures you gave us?’
‘Sister, he took me to his studio and let me choose the pictures
he’d painted.’
Nina wished, once again, that she’d remembered tissues. She
tried to smile at Kate or say a word or two of congratulations, but
her throat felt too constricted to speak. Oh, this was a well-meant
but ridiculous idea of her sister’s; no warning, no consultation
and big, upending consequences, no doubt about that. A risk
not worth taking.
She reached for her sister and hugged her, and when she felt
her sister hug her back, the tears came. The sisters laughed and
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Alison Irvine
cried and put their palms to their eyes and shook their heads and
eventually Kate said, ‘Get a grip, Nina.’
She started up the car and pulled away. At the junction Nina
said, ‘I do need to talk to you. I have to tell you about Patrick
Stone. I’ve found him.’
But Kate said, ‘The obsession endures,’ which Nina thought
was a little rude. She felt as swiftly and furiously put out as those
great-aunts of hers, slapping and flapping at each other in New
Zealand. The fury passed, as it always did, and Nina reminded
herself that her sister was home again, back where she was needed
and loved, and that was enough for one day, Nina, get a grip.
24

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Edinburgh EH1 2ND
Scotland
Telephone: 0131 225 4326 (24 hours)
Email: sales@luath.co.uk
Website: www.luath.co.uk