Necessary as Blood

would have to tell Gemma first.
    Her sister Cyn hadn‘t wanted to do it, had instead asked him to be the bearer of bad tidings. Perhaps, to give Cyn credit, she just hadn‘t felt able to talk about it.
    The bone-marrow tests had come back, Cyn had said. Neither she nor Gemma, nor any of their children, were a match. And their mum, Vi, had taken a turn for the worse.

    Gemma stood in the hall, the silence of the house settling round her like an exhaled breath. She felt suddenly alien, an interloper in a life interrupted.
    But having cleared the decks with Duncan and the boys, she meant to follow through on her promises to Tim and Alia, and she had better have a look round the house before she started making phone calls.
    She touched the handlebar of the bike parked so neatly between the door and the stairs. A man‘s racing bike, but not, to her relatively inexperienced eye, terribly new or terribly expensive. It, like the house, looked well used and well cared for. A flower transfer was stuck on one side of the businesslike safety helmet. Charlotte‘s handiwork, Gemma guessed, and thought it said something about Naz Malik that he had left it on. And if Naz rode the bike regularly, she wondered why he had not taken it that day.
    Trailing her fingers across the newel post, she hesitated, then decided to start with the sitting room. She stepped through the doorway and stopped, taking in impressions. The wide-plank flooring continued from the hall. It looked as though it might be original to the house, as did the solid wooden shutters covering the lower half of the casements.
    Panelling, shutters, fireplace surround — all simple, all in the same soft green. Sofa and squashy armchairs were slip-covered in a paler shade. A large petit-point wool rug anchored the furniture, its colours so faded she could barely make out the floral design. But there the neutral palette ended.
    Floral still lifes, many unframed, were propped on the chair rail around the circumference of the room. It was an odd but appealing effect, bringing the high-ceilinged proportions of the Georgian design down to a more human scale.
    Large baskets scattered about the room corralled toys, but from one a tattered sock-monkey seemed to have made a failed attempt at escape. One foot had caught on the basket‘s edge, and he hung upside down, his stitched features frozen in a grimace of surprise.
    The lamps and tables were simple, but a brass chandelier filled with candles hung from the ceiling, and several sconces mounted on the walls held candles as well.
    At one end of the sofa, another basket held piles of newspapers beginning to yellow. Gemma touched a finger to the top sheet — it came away covered in dust. The banner identified the paper as the Guardian, dated mid-May.
    On the other side of the fireplace a chaise and a floor lamp formed a reading area. Both chaise and lampshade were covered in an unexpected patchwork of floral chintz, so whimsically bright it made Gemma smile. Books had been stacked on the floor beside the chaise in tottering piles. Gemma knelt beside them, reading titles. Some were coffee-table size — Georgian architecture and decoration, textile design, histories of painting and furniture. But there were also books on the East End, novels with page corners carelessly dogeared, and children‘s picture books, including many of Toby‘s favourite Shirley Hughes‘s.
    On top of the largest stack, which seemed to serve as an end-table, sat a blue stoneware mug. It looked as if its owner had been interrupted in the midst of a cup of tea, but when Gemma examined the mug, she found it empty and spotless.
    She stood again, catching her own reflection in a great, gilded mirror over the fireplace. She tucked a strand of her hair, now growing long again, behind her ear, and saw that she‘d transferred the smear of dust from the newspapers to her nose. Lacking a tissue, she rubbed at the mark with the back of her hand while examining the display on the mantelpiece. A cracked creamware jug. A child‘s drawing of red stick figures under yellow clouds, framed. A porcelain border collie, its expression so lifelike she reached out to stroke it.
    There were no photos.
    The dining room displayed the same mixture of simplicity with a dash of eccentricity — the chairs that circled the imposing round dining table were mismatched, the seat cushions covered in different fabrics. Here the chair rail held yellowing oil portraits, both bewigged men