Emma had left her two glass paperweights and a blue glass cat. For her eighth birthday Rachaela bought Ruth something from the local Sunday market, with misgiving and a knowledge of unassailable rightness. It was a mirror inset with purple iris flowers, peacocks’ feathers, shells of pink opaque glass. ‘Oh,’ said Ruth when she saw it. She thanked Rachaela coolly and bore the glass into her cubby.

The plant, David, had died although Rachaela had put it in a window. Now Ruth began to collect, with saved-up pocket money, false flowers of enamel, and finally a birdcage with a painted wooden linnet.

Glimpsing into her daughter’s area—the strip of wall now hung with strange prints in clip frames and Ruth’s own latest exotic work, the mirror, the bells and shawls, flowers and cage and even, just above the chest, the white face of a clock which did not go—Rachaela saw Scarabae. Perhaps she had encouraged it, or not. Ruth was a living plant which put out stained-glass flowers. You could not snap them off, as perhaps Rachaela’s own mother had tried to do. For how much of the shadowy Scarabae had she seen in her daughter, and tried to poison with her haircuts and crosses on the sprouts?

Beyond the windows, out in the streets, the coloured glass of the seasons came and went. The distant park was like a calendar. Green, yellow and brown the pages fell from its trees, black spider-web bareness and another ice age of pure snow.

Emma was never mentioned.

The school took Ruth to museums, art galleries and gardens; the seaside.

At night and the weekends, they sat in silence but for the music centre and the thump-thump from the flat below.

It was easy yet impossible to forget the child was there.

Jonquil was in the shop when the young woman came in. She was about twenty-two or three, with glasses and a washed young face. She walked up to Rachaela.

‘Mrs Day?’

‘Yes,’ said Rachaela.

‘Ms,’ said Jonquil, ‘Mzzz Day.’

‘Oh, well,’ said the young woman. ‘I’m Miss Barrett, from Ruth’s school.’

‘What’s happened?’ asked Jonquil.

‘Oh, nothing—well, something. But I mean Ruth’s quite all right. I’m sorry to bother you at work, Mrs Day. But I wanted a word with you when the child wasn’t there.’

Jonquil swung her boots off the counter.

‘Go through to the back, Rachaela. Take Mzzz Barrett with you. I’ll see to those magazines.’

They went into the back room. It was crammed with boxes and piled by books. Letters overspilled a tray and the old typewriter squatted among the coffee things. Over a radiator hung three pairs of Denise’s tights, long dry, ‘As I say, I’m sorry about seeking you out, Mrs Day, but I felt it would be best to talk to you without Ruth. If you prefer I can come to your flat at a convenient time.’