1 … Discovery

      They were playing a game of hide and seek, as they so often did. Some people might have seen it as a lack of imagination, but as both Dot and Mavis displayed so much imagination in later life, it seems more likely a fact of circumstance. Druith is after all miles from anywhere, sunk in a low, damp Welsh valley, and Dot’s house suggested itself to hide and seek in a multitude of ways. Not that two ten-year-old girls were aware of any of this. They didn’t even find Dot’s house strange: it was still nothing more than a marker in their childhood landscape, and the fact that the floors tipped, cupboard doors opened into secret passages and a concealed turret sprouted out of the side of the house washed over them. The only thing they were beginning to find amusing were the plates which Dot’s grandmother inexplicably chose to hang on the walls. ‘What next?’ they’d whisper to each other. ‘Will we be eating off paintings?’ Although one glance at the heavy oils of permanently displeased relatives and windswept landscapes made this seem very unlikely.

      They never played hide and seek when they were at Mavis’s house, not just because she lived in a perfectly proportioned box with no nooks and crannies, but also because her mother looked as if she might cry if you so much as walked on her permanently hoovered floors or breathed on her dustless possessions. Which was in direct contrast to Dot’s mother, who seemed to float through life without noticing anything, and her grandmother, who unfathomably didn’t care about dirt but about most other things. Out of two peculiar options, however, Dot’s house always seemed the most appealing.

      Mavis had annoyed Dot that day. She was a fastidious girl, given to huffing and puffing and slapping logic all over Dot’s daydreams. Games of beautiful princesses or magic carpets were never allowed and sometimes Dot was bored by the shops where prices had to be accurate and bills added up precisely. That was usually when she suggested a game of hide and seek.

      She left Mavis counting in her attic bedroom, nasally intoning the numbers up to one hundred, and raced down the stairs to the second-floor landing. Once there she weighed up her options and realised she’d used all her best places a dozen times already. Mavis would go straight to the bottom of the laundry basket, the jutting shelves in the larder, even behind the basement door which they both found so scary. The door to her mother’s bedroom was open and the space below her mother’s bed beckoned as invitingly as a pair of outstretched arms. Dot hesitated on the threshold, knowing that Mavis would never enter this room without permission and wondering if this meant she would be cheating. Mavis had already reached sixty-five; she didn’t have much time. Dot glanced behind her but her grandmother’s door was firmly closed, as it always was. Besides, her mother wouldn’t care. It was only her grandma who was mortally offended if anyone entered her room without permission; a peculiar rule which had somehow permeated the consciousness of the house. Even Dot’s mother knocked on her own ten-year-old daughter’s door before coming in to kiss her goodnight. Dot decided that if she left the door open it wouldn’t technically count as cheating.

      Dot always felt depressed by her mother’s room, although at that time she would never have used this word to describe what she felt whenever she went in there. She would have said that it made her feel empty, or sad, which is of course a childish way of saying the same thing. Nor would she have vocalised those emotions anyway as, even at the age of ten, she already understood enough about the human heart to know never to articulate feelings like those to her mother,