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castle are, she says, devoid of any value other than the fact that they belonged to dead relations: “The only possible message they bore was the of narrowness of late 19th-century French provincial piety.”

Tindall reflects on lost railway lines, lost letters, and the bleakness of a future in which hard drives will provide historical evidence. She free-associates from purgatory to photographs, The Paston Letters, false memory syndrome, suicide, and population pressure – because chance connections are what interest her. “Even some of the names by which countries are commonly known today are as come-by-chance as if they themselves were broken shards, randomly picked upon the beaches of time.”

America, for example, is named after Amerigo Vespucci, who happened upon New England in the 16th century; Britain is thought to derive from the Phoenician word for tin. “I return to St Cuthbert,” Tindall announces, at the start of Chapter 5, having ended Chapter 4 despairing over the internet. “I have already mentioned”, she says in Chapter 11, having noted the disappearance of the Fleet river in Kentish Town, “that the decorative plate, valued and preserved in the Camp-Montague household because some forgotten forebear had given it to another, looks like a ‘fairing’ from the days when fields began just off the Mile End Road.”

In passages like this, Tindall forgets that there is a reader at the receiving end, trying to keep up. And when she does remember us, the condescension is startling: “In an earlier paragraph I see that I have cited the classical myth of Orpheus and Eurydice as if I assume that all readers will be familiar with it.”

Reflecting on her oeuvre,

Tindall returns to Célestine and repeats the story of the chance discovery on which the book was based. She also describes her decision to sell their house in Célestine’s village. “But how”, one friend asked me, “can you bear to leave a place that has been so important to you – and you to us – a place that you have written about, have really put on the map?” She can bear to leave, Tindall loftily replies, because her work here is complete. “By my research and the publication and success of my book, Célestine, in French, as well as English, I knew that I had in a sense given people’s own fugitive pasts back to them… Time has, in its inexorable way, moved on.”

The same might be said of this chilly and elegiac volume. Tindall has returned to her family their fugitive pasts, and readers will return to Tindall’s earlier work.