Rachaela made her coffee and came out of the kitchen. She looked at her flat as she always did, her flat, and Ruth’s area. Generally Ruth slept up here, although now and then she would come politely to ask Rachaela if she could stay the night on Emma’s sofa. It was Emma who insisted Ruth always ask. Rachaela and Ruth knew it did not mean anything. The moment of asking was one of their few times of agreement and understanding.

Ruth’s area had been Emma’s idea also.

The child’s bed, draped in midnight blue, stood behind a wicker screen with a crimson shawl cast over it. Bells hung on the inside which occasionally Ruth, when in residence, would strike. Behind the screen too was a chest of drawers, whose top was used as a table for Ruth’s treasures, her paintbox, and her teetering tower of books.

Emma had taught her to read before school, and now the chest was piled with golden and rose fairy books, Winnie the Pooh, Alice in Wonderland, and other things which perhaps Ruth did not yet grasp or should not yet be reading: Lord of the Flies, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Cleopatra. Rachaela did not oversee the books and Emma believed in stretching a child’s mind.

Any homework Ruth saw to at Emma’s flat, or sitting on the dark-blue bed. She had also had a pot plant on the chest called David. The plant, robbed of light, did not do well, and eventually David was moved down to Emma’s windows.

Half an hour after Rachaela had seen Ruth into the house, Emma’s knock sounded on the door.

Rachaela let her in.

Emma looked uneasy and at the same time glowing. Perhaps Ruth had done something especially stunning, as when she had been made chief maid of honour to the school’s May Queen. Emma had insisted Rachaela go with her, and they had stood outside the railings, in the biting May breeze, watching little girls in pink frocks and shivery legs strewing paper petals, while Ruth, in the red party dress Emma had bought her, crowned a pretty smirking child with tinsel.

‘Ruth’s eating her tea,’ said Emma, ‘I got those sausages she likes, and tomatoes.’

‘Thank you,’ said Rachaela automatically.

‘There’s been rather a development,’ said Emma.

‘What’s she done?’

There had been the time, too, when Ruth made a painting of a dragon devouring a knight which had apparently scared another child. Someone had come from the school and seen Emma, who had laughed them to scorn.

‘Done? Oh, it’s not Ruth. I’m afraid it’s me.’

‘What have you done?’

‘I don’t know where to start. It’s thrown me completely. Out of the blue.’

Emma sat down in the chair, near to Ruth’s area.

‘It’s Liz,’ she said.

Rachaela had to wrack her brains. Liz was one of the daughters, the eldest.

‘Liz,’ she prompted.