"Milly? Are you alright?"

"What is an ox?"

"A cow. A bullock." Julia shrugged. "I don't know. Why?"

They had eaten ox heart as children. Rosemary, never having so much as boiled an egg before her marriage, had learned to cook the kind of stalwart, old-fashioned food that Victor favored as being both nutritious and cheap. Boarding-school food, the kind he was brought up on. The very thought of all those liver-and-bacon casseroles and steak-and-kidney puddings made Amelia feel sick. She could still see a bloody heart sitting on the kitchen counter, dark and glistening, and swagged with threads of fat, looking as if it had only just stopped beating, while her mother, huge knife in hand, contemplated it with an enigmatic expression on her face.

"Oxtail soup, I remember that," Julia said, making a disgusted face. "Was it really made from a tail?"

Rosemary had slipped out of her own life very easily. She had shown no tenacity for it at all when she discovered that the baby girl she was carrying when Olivia disappeared had a twin, not Victor's longed-for son, but a tumorous changeling that grew and swelled inside her unchallenged. By the time anyone realized it signaled a life ending rather than a life beginning, it was too late. Annabelle lived for only a few hours and her cancerous counterpart was removed, but Rosemary was dead within six months.

Victor seemed to be snoring – a deep, wheezing noise as if his windpipe were narrowing and collapsing. This was followed at regular intervals by a dreadful gasping when his reflexes kicked in and he found another breath. Amelia and Julia stared at each other in alarm. "Is that a death rattle?" Julia whispered, and Amelia said, "Shush," because it seemed impolite to talk about the mechanics of death in front of the dying. "He can't hear," Julia said, and Amelia said, "That's not the point."

This noise subsided after a while and Victor gave all the signs of being peacefully asleep. Amelia made them both tea, scrubbing out the stains from the mugs first, and they drank the tea standing by the window, looking down into the darkness of the garden.

"What about the funeral service?" Julia whispered. "He won't want anything Christian, will he?" Apart from a few feeble attempts on Rosemary's part to send them to Sunday school, they had been brought up without religion. As a mathematician, Victor considered it his duty to inculcate skepticism in his daughters, especially as he thought they were frivolous girls – apart from Sylvia, of course, who had always traded on being a bit of a maths nerd. After she left their lives, "nerd" was turned into "prodigy" by Victor and later still into "child genius" so that the longer she was gone the more clever she became, whereas, as far as Victor was concerned, Amelia and Julia grew more brainless the older they got. There was a time when Amelia might have argued with him, although it would more likely have been Julia who would have put up a spirited defense of "the arts" because Amelia found it difficult to counter Victor's hectoring style. Now she wasn't so sure, wasn't he right? Didn't they, after all, know nothing?

"And so what do you think?" Julia said. "He has left the house to us, hasn't he? Do you think he's left us any money? Christ, I hope he has." Victor had never discussed his will with them, never discussed money with them. He gave the impression of having none, but then he had always been miserly. Julia started airing her grievances about the family plot again, and Amelia said, "It would be quicker to cremate him, you know. I think it takes longer to get a burial certificate."

"But we'd probably be cursed for life," Julia said, "like women in Greek tragedy who don't observe the correct rituals for their dead father, the king," and Amelia said, "We're not characters in a play, Julia. This isn't Euripides," and Julia said, "No, really, Milly, it's bad enough that we don't love him," and Amelia said, "Whatever," and frowned when she heard herself sounding like one of her students.

Julia announced she was going to have a nap and she cradled her head in her arms on the grubby bedspread so that she looked as if she were making some kind of strange homage to her dying father. Victor's big hands rested on top of the coverlet, folded piously in a way that suggested he was prepared for death. It would have taken only the slightest effort for him to raise one of those hands and rest it on Julia's head, to give her a final benediction. Had he ever touched them in a kind way? A kiss, a hug? A tender caress on the cheek? If he had, Amelia couldn't recall it. "Wake me if anything happens," Julia mumbled. "If he dies or something." Julia was still a heavyweight sleeper, and she was as dead to the world as Victor within minutes. Amelia looked at the dark curls on her sister's head and felt a rush of affection for her that was more like a pang of grief.

Julia hadn't had much work recently. She used to work all the time, provincial theater, archly modern plays in tiny London studios and bit parts in television – underclass victims in The Bill and terminal patients in Casualty (she'd died twice in ten years), but now she never even seemed to be called to auditions. She had done some kind of corporate training video last year but it was for an oil company subsidiary and Amelia had been annoyed with her for doing it, saying that she "should have considered the politics of it," and Julia had said that it was easy to have "the luxury of politics when you had enough food to eat," and Amelia said, "That's a ridiculous exaggeration. When did you ever starve?" but now she was sorry because Julia had been happy when she told her about the job and she'd spoiled it for her.

Amelia had seen almost all of Julia's work, and although she always told her how "wonderful" she was, because that was theatrical protocol, she often found herself thinking that Julia wasn't really very special at all when she was onstage. The best thing she'd seen her in was a pantomime in Bristol, a generic kind of piece, probably Cinderella, where Julia had been cast as a dog – a black poodle with a lion cut and a French accent. Julia's shape, short and busty, had somehow been perfectly suited to the costume and she had caught a certain kind of Parisian arrogance that the audience loved. She hadn't needed a wig – her own untamed hair had been piled up in a topknot with a bow in it. Amelia had never thought of Julia as a poodle before then – she always imagined her as a Jack Russell. It seemed suddenly very sad to Amelia that the best role of Julia's career was as a dog. And that she didn't need a wig to play a poodle.

Was he dead? He looked very much like he did when he was asleep – lying on his back with his eyes closed and his beaky mouth open – but there was no sign of the rise and fall of his troubled breathing and his skin was an odd putty color that suddenly brought back the memory of a dead Rosemary in a hospital bed, so unexpected that Amelia couldn't move for a moment. She must have fallen asleep as well. The bad daughters of the king who couldn't even sustain a deathbed vigil.

Sammy got up awkwardly from the rug by the side of the bed and hobbled over to Amelia, thrusting his dry nose into her hand inquiringly. "Poor old boy," Amelia said to the dog. She gently shook Julia awake and told her Victor was dead. "How do you know he's dead?" Julia asked, foggy with sleep. She had a livid red mark on her cheek where her watch had dug into her.

"Because he's not breathing," Amelia said.

An almost festive air had been created between them by Victor's departure, and although it was only six o'clock in the morning, Julia, as if following some prescribed postmortem procedure, poured them a large brandy each. Amelia thought she would be sick if she drank it and surprised herself by enjoying it. Later, they walked, quite drunk at eight in the morning, to the local Spar to buy provisions, filling their basket with things that Amelia would never normally have bought – bacon, sausages, floury white rolls, chocolate, and gin – giggling like the little girls they had forgotten they ever were.