She stopped for a moment, drank some tea and sniffed. Winter. What a bore. Freezing nights and her mother still not complaining. If only she would act normally, like all the others who crowded into that dreadful place, getting meat jammed in their teeth and holding hot water bottles to their stomachs, wiping their streaming eyes with the backs of their painful hands and chivvying each other along. But her mother refused to be drawn. She was silent, focused, upright except to turn slow watery eyes upon her daughter, fail to smile and look away. She never asked her how she was, never said thank you when Finetta drove halfway into town to fetch her new stockings, never said thank you at all.

With her ankles crossed, a cashmere thrown over her shoulders, an electric fire pulled to the middle of the kitchen floor emitting a three-bar heat, Finetta looked like a flower grown used to growing in the dark. Precision, that’s what she cared about, a commanding order that gave her life outline. Tea before toast, a quilt before death, an annual lunch with her brother. She turned it over, tied the thread and snapped it with her teeth. The last patch was from a blanket the moths had got to. She hadn’t liked it. It had reminded her of poverty.

The Rayburn poured slow heat over clean tiles, empty surfaces, polished sink. The cupboards, worktops and floor were all varying shades of tan. Tan, she’d discovered, was an easy colour to make look clean. She took a half-loaf of bread from the bread tin, a board from behind the sink, a knife from the drawer, and cut a slice. Tea, toast, precision, quilts, her mother, and occasionally she made fudge in the afternoon when she’d nothing better to do – she had tins of the stuff, she couldn’t keep up – but these things kept her occupied. As a child she’d had her bird book.

It had been easier then – her thoughts had not developed the ragged edges they had now, the subtle insistence that there was more to realise if only she’d follow them up. When she was a child they had been single, isolated cut-outs which had been easily replaced with a picture of a robin. Now she had to look away sharply to avoid seeing what her thoughts dragged with them. But she was strong. She would not be drawn. It did no one any good.