Edith Thorne stood at the kitchen window of number twenty-seven Marlborough Road, watching a coal cart rattle past on the wet cobbles. The horse’s breath plumed in the November air, and the driver walked beside with his cap pulled low, a canvas sack over one shoulder. Behind her, the wireless hissed and crackled as Arthur adjusted the crystal detector, trying to bring in the evening broadcast from Savoy Hill.

“There,” he said. “Listen.”

A voice emerged from the static, thin and distant, as though speaking from the bottom of a well. Edith turned but did not leave the window. She had been watching the street for an hour, waiting for the postman to turn the corner. He had not come. The letter she expected—from the solicitor in Lincoln’s Inn—was now three days late, and she had reached that state of suspension in which every ordinary sound felt like a message from another life.

“You’ll worry yourself thin,” Arthur said.

She said nothing. The wireless played a music-hall tune she did not recognise. On the mantelpiece, the carriage clock showed half past four. Soon she would need to light the gas mantles and start the supper, but for now she stayed at the glass, her breath fogging the pane, her reflection a ghost layered over the street.

The letter arrived the following morning, slipped through the brass slot onto the hall mat. Edith picked it up and stood in the dim light of the hallway, the wallpaper a pattern of dark green leaves she had always disliked, and read the solicitor’s careful script. He had traced the title. The land in Saskatchewan existed. The claim was valid. But the original grant was entangled with a second mortgage taken out by Arthur’s father in 1909, and to clear it would require a payment of eighty-seven pounds. Eighty-seven pounds was more than Arthur earned in four months.

She folded the letter and placed it in the drawer of the hall table, beneath the telephone directory, and did not mention it to Arthur. The coal delivery was due, and Thomas had a cough that kept him awake at night, and the winter coat she had worn since 1921 was beginning to fray at the cuffs. The claim to a piece of Canada—a country she had never seen, a prairie she could not picture—sat in the drawer like a stone dropped into deep water, sending rings outward that she could not yet measure.

Fifty years later, in the same house, at the same window, Margaret Thorne looked out at a different street. The coal carts were gone. A Ford Cortina was parked at the kerb, its offside wing dented, rust blooming along the sill. A boy in flared denim sat on the low wall opposite, a transistor radio pressed to his ear, and through the glass Maggie could hear the tinny spill of pop music distorted by distance.

The house was divided now. The ground floor belonged to a retired printer named Mr. Cowley who kept budgerigars and smelled of surgical spirits. Maggie had the upper two floors, accessed by the same narrow staircase Edith had climbed a thousand times, the banister still loose at the same joint. She was twenty-nine years old, and she had come back to clear out her mother’s things—her mother having died in the spring, of a stroke that came without warning—and to decide whether to sell the flat or stay.

The attic hatch was in the ceiling of the back bedroom. She pulled the cord and the ladder unfolded with a sound of old wood and dust, and she climbed into a space that had not been entered in decades. The light from a single bare bulb showed trunks, hatboxes, a dressmaker’s mannequin with a wasp waist and no head, and a stack of newspapers from 1926 tied with string. The headlines spoke of the General Strike. The print was brown at the edges.

She worked through the afternoon, separating rubbish from keepsakes. The photograph album she kept. The fox-fur stole with the glass eyes she put aside for the costume hire shop. And in a cardboard hatbox with a faded label from a shop in Bloomsbury, she found a bundle of letters tied with red ribbon, and beneath them a document on thick paper with a red wax seal—a land grant from the Dominion of Canada, dated 1907, issued to one Nathaniel Thorne, farmer, late of Bedfordshire.

She sat on the dusty floorboards and read every word.

Edith made her decision on a Tuesday, after the butcher presented her with a bill she could not pay. She walked to the public library on Holloway Road and consulted a directory of solicitors, then wrote to a Mr. Hornby of Bedford Row, who had advertised himself as specialising in colonial property. She did not tell Arthur. She did not tell anyone. In her mind, this was not deception but protection. Arthur was a man who looked forward, not back. He would spend months debating a course of action and then do nothing. The winter was coming. The boy needed boots.

She met Mr. Hornby in his office, a narrow room above a tobacconist’s shop where the smell of rolling tobacco came through the floorboards. He was a thin man with pince-nez and a watch chain across his waistcoat. He examined the documents with the patience of a man who measured time in fees.

“The value is uncertain,” he said. “The land is agricultural. The market for such claims is speculative at best. I can find you a buyer, but you must be realistic.”

“How much?”

“Forty pounds. Perhaps forty-five, if we are fortunate.”

She thought of the eighty-seven pounds needed to clear the mortgage. The claim was worthless, then, because they could not afford to make it good. Better to take what could be taken.

“Forty-five,” she said. “Yes. Do it.”

She walked home down Upper Street in the fading light, past the windows of the Great Northern Hotel, past the women in their dropped-waist dresses and cloche hats, past the omnibuses belching exhaust into the faces of the pedestrians. A poster on a hoarding advertised the new Lyons Corner House opening on the Strand. A man in a flat cap sold the Evening Standard from a stand. The November air smelled of coal smoke and horse manure and the faint sweetness of roasted chestnuts from a vendor on the corner. She was twenty-seven years old, and she had just sold a piece of the future for a winter’s warmth. It was the most sensible thing she had ever done.

In the reading room of the Public Record Office at Chancery Lane, Maggie sat before a microfiche reader, turning the handle that scrolled through frames of records from the Colonial Office. The machine hummed. The light from the screen was greenish and gave her a headache. On the desk beside her, a woman in a cardigan was taking notes with a fountain pen, and somewhere a radiator knocked.

It took her three visits to piece the story together. The land claim sold by her great-grandmother Edith Thorne in November 1925 had passed through three hands before being consolidated into a larger holding. By 1947, oil had been discovered in the region. The company that had acquired the title had drilled successfully, and by 1960 the land was producing. She found a newspaper clipping from the Saskatoon Star-Phoenix, dated 1962, reporting on the sale of the leasehold for a sum that made her set down the microfiche and stare at the green letters for a full minute.

She thought: If Edith had held on. If she had found a way to raise the money. If she had believed in a future she could not see.

Then she thought: But Edith was standing in a kitchen in 1925 with a sick child and an unpaid butcher’s bill, and Canada was a word on a map.

She went home through a city that was, in its own way, as distant from 1925 as Saskatchewan. The punk badges on the lapels of the teenagers on the Tube, the graffiti that read NO FUTURE in red paint on a hoarding, the newsagent’s headlines about the referendum on Europe, and on every second telephone pole a flyer advertising a new LP by David Bowie. She passed a launderette where a woman in an afghan coat stared through the window at the tumbling machines, a stack of polystyrene cups on the sill. An old Routemaster bus growled past, its platform crowded with passengers clutching the pole, their breath hanging in the cold. It was not her grandmother’s London. It was a London that had been through another war, through austerity and the sixties and the three-day week, and the conviction that the past was a foreign country had never felt so literal.

She reached Marlborough Road in the early evening. Mr. Cowley was on the front step, trying to unstick the lock on his letterbox, and he raised a hand to her.

“Find anything interesting up there?”

“A ghost,” she said.

He laughed and went inside, and she climbed the stairs to her flat and sat at the kitchen table—the same table, she realised, that had been in the house since before the war, its surface scarred with the marks of a hundred years of meals—and spread the photographs she had found across it. Black-and-white images of Edith in a cloche hat, holding a small boy in her arms outside the front door. The same door Maggie had walked through moments before.

She tried to imagine the woman in the photograph making a choice. Not a mistake, because it was not a mistake. In Edith’s reference frame, selling the claim was the rational act of a woman protecting her family in a world where the future was a luxury. Maggie, standing in the same kitchen fifty years later, could see the outcome that Edith could not. Both of them were right. The gap between them was not ignorance but time.

She picked up a letter, the one in which Mr. Hornby confirmed the sale. Edith’s handwriting was cramped and even, the hand of someone who had been taught that a woman’s writing should not call attention to itself. It ended: I trust this is for the best.

Maggie closed her eyes. In the silence of the flat, with the evening coming on beyond the window and the traffic on the Holloway Road rising and falling like a tide, she heard the voice of a woman who had stood in that exact spot half a century before, moving through a world that had not yet happened to her, making a decision that would echo through lives she would never know.

She thought: I am the echo.

And she understood, for the first time, that understanding was not the point. The point was that her grandmother had loved her, had chosen for her, even though she could not know her. That love had crossed the years like light from a star, arriving in a different time, at a different frequency, still true.

Outside, a siren passed. The boy with the transistor had gone. The house settled around her, the same floorboards, the same walls, and she sat in the kitchen until the light had gone entirely, letting the darkness hold her, letting the distance between two women in the same room become, for a moment, something like a bridge.