Roma was kind of a tragic figure. She had been a flapper around the time of the nineteen-twenties and before that had been in the Women's Flying Ambulance Unit (can't remember the precise name but somehting similar) and had worked as a journalist. She makes a very brief appearance earlier in the novel, but suffers a great loss and for the rest of her life lives a lie moored up in her house that has not changed since the Twenties...