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Now

One of the women buying amber was so much like Mrs Cosway that it gave me a shock to see her. She seemed shorter but people shrink with age. Otherwise the likeness, from her curly white hair to her spindly legs and fine ankles, was almost uncanny. She was holding up a string of pale yellow beads, looking at them and smiling with that excitement you only see on the faces of women who love shopping and pretty things.

Charles has a theory that if you are in X, a distant place you have never been to before, and while there you meet or pass in the street your nearest and dearest, a spouse or lover or even your child, you won't recognize them. Not only do you not expect to see them there; you know they can't be there because you have certain knowledge that at this moment they are hundreds of miles away. Of course, they can be there, they are there, they have deceived you or your knowledge of their whereabouts is in fact very uncertain, but the chances are you will pass on, telling yourself this was no more than an extraordinary resemblance.

Mrs Cosway fitted into none of the categories I have named. I hadn't even liked her but I had certain knowledge of where she was now. She was dead. This woman looked like her but was someone else. I turned away and began to walk on. She called after me.

‘Kerstin!’

If she had pronounced my name as it should be pronounced, that is as, more or less, ‘Shashtin’, I might have turned round and gone up to her but it wouldn't have been a shock, it wouldn't have sent a shiver through me. But she had called me ‘Curstin’, the way the Cosways, all of them except John, invariably had done. I walked across the cobbled square and went up to her.

‘You don't know me, do you? Of course I'm awfully changed, I know that. It's inevitable at my age. ’

The voice told me. ‘Ella,’ I said.

She nodded, pleased.

Zoë was a tall dark woman in her early thirties, handsome, brown-eyed, holding a child of about six by the hand. We shook hands.

‘Does she remind you of anyone?’

‘Winifred,’ I said.

Zoë made a face. ‘Oh, Mother. ’

How often had I heard those words from Ida when Mrs Cosway said something particularly outrageous.

‘What brings you to Riga?’

‘Zoë wanted to see the art nouveau in Alberta Street. She's doing an art history course, so we thought we'd do a tour of the Baltic States. ’ If Ella assumed I was doing the same thing, if for a different reason, she was right but I doubt if that was why she didn't ask. The Cosways were never much interested in other people's activities. ‘Shall I buy this amber? You'll say it's a wicked price, I know. ’

‘On the contrary,’ I said. ‘You'll never get it cheaper anywhere else. ’

Perhaps she resented this for she said rather severely, ‘Mother never forgave you for the diary, you know. ’

This wasn't the moment for argument. ‘It's a long time ago. What happened – is – mean, what became of John?’