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Evelyn came out of the back door of the house and found a bare patch of gravel where the car had been. A large rectangular island in a sea of dust. She didn’t know where the car had gone, or who had taken it. She didn’t think it ran anymore.

The house was empty apart from Lily and herself. Lily was still asleep, and walking the long halls and landings had the muted feeling of a dream. Twilight all the time now, no matter what the hour of day. She walked out of the kitchen door and deliberately didn’t wear shoes so that the gravel would hurt the soles of her feet and prove that she was, in fact, awake. The garden was in gorgeous full bloom, despite everything. She walked to the bottom of the grounds and found her mother at the gate, standing in the middle of the driveway. The gates were open. She cut a defiant and forlorn silhouette.

Evelyn stood beside her mother and looked down the unpaved road to where it curved out of sight. It was as pitted and cratered as the surface of the moon.

I thought the car was broken, she said.

So did I, said Mama.

A long time passed.

Go and get your sister, said Mama. Time we should be getting on with things.

They spent the day drawing water from the lake. They were still nowhere near finishing the channels that their mother had proposed for the front garden. Endless purgatorial hours back and forth with buckets and tubs, their mother saying nothing apart from an occasional muttering under her breath that was new and frightening. Lily squatted in the reeds, showing her sister handfuls of frog spawn. Everywhere the warm and fetid stink of the lake’s edge.

They were inside eating supper when they heard the rattle of the car’s engine and the crunch of gravel under its tires. Their mother leaped up, knocking her plate to the floor. By the time Evelyn was outside, the boot of the car was open and her parents seemed to be struggling with each other. Evelyn went to the rear window of the car and put her face to the glass. It was loaded with tins of fruit and vegetables, ham and corned beef, beans and marrowfat peas, several drums of water, some white unlabeled boxes that Evelyn presumed were first aid supplies but that Lily continued to maintain, for months afterward, were doughnuts or cream cakes or some other treat.

You left us, their mother said. You left us, you fucking bastard.

He struggled as she gripped his wrists and brought his face an inch or two from hers. For a few seconds it was impossible to tell whether they were kissing passionately or trying to claw each other’s eyes out.

In the middle of the night Evelyn was woken by the engine starting again. She sat up in bed and heard the car laboring over the gravel. It choked and stopped. The driver restarted it and then revved it again and pressed the accelerator down fully. Evelyn’s heart roared at the sound. There was a spray of stones and an impact that she felt in the very roots of the house. Lily sat up next to her. The darkness itself seemed to vibrate.

What was that? Lily said.

Evelyn told her to stay in bed and went out onto the landing. A commotion in the kitchen. Before she reached the bottom of the staircase, her mother swept past her into the hall. She didn’t even see Evelyn. She was wearing her nightdress, and it was smudged and bloodied. There was a deep cut on her forehead that looked black and almost oily, and she was holding her elbow to her chest as if she had broken or dislocated something. Evelyn’s father was not far behind her, following dumbly, one arm half outstretched in an ambiguous gesture—Evelyn didn’t know if he was offering help or asking for it.

He seemed a wraith these days. So thin. She remembered only vaguely the brassy and booming voice he had once had, and could not square it with the man who now haunted the landings.

Perhaps you’ll decide to stay put now, said Mama.

Evelyn waited for them to pass. She went down the hall and out of the kitchen, and there on the right-hand side of the house was the car, its front crumpled like a paper bag, the windscreen shattered from where it had been driven into the corner of the exterior wall of the playroom. There was smoke coming from under the wrecked bonnet but no flames that she could see. The food was still packed on the backseat, and it seemed undamaged.

Her mother appeared.

Come away, she said. Come away, Evie. It was just an accident.

One of her arms was dangling uselessly at her side.

Evelyn went back upstairs to bed. There were footsteps all over the house, up and down stairs, but no talking. Eventually the house was silent again. When Evelyn told her sister what had happened, Lily was quiet for a while, almost long enough for Evelyn to fall asleep, but then she got up and went downstairs and came back with a tin of pineapple rings she’d snatched through one of the car’s broken windows. Evelyn watched as Lily tried to open it with a screwdriver. She succeeded only in puncturing a hole in the outside of the tin, but that was good enough for both of them, and they spent the rest of the night passing the tin between them and supping on the syrup that squirted out.

The next morning their mother’s arm was in a makeshift sling, though she still had one free hand with which to padlock the gates of the estate and throw the key far, far into the middle of the lake.