If Sybil is the summer – bright and warm, open and inviting – and Edith autumn – flashes of brilliance, but mostly quite dreary – Mary thinks she herself must surely be the winter, cold and still and bleak, dead and frozen before her time. She sees the chill inside her reflected from all around, from Patrick who she never gave a thought to, from her father to whom she is almost, but not quite, perfect, from all those who look at her and see only the bite of frost, until she believes it is all she is, that she can never thaw.

She's wrong, in the end; Matthew, it turns out, is the spring.