Ruth had watched storms since she was three or four.

The thunder bombarded the capital.

Rachaela got up, and in the light of the street lamps through the uncurtained windows, padded into the kitchen.

‘Do you want a drink? Milk? Coffee?’

‘No thank you.’

Rachaela did not turn on the light. She filled the kettle and set it to boil. The saffron-azure of the gas flame starred the orange dark. The lightning came again.

As she drank the coffee something made her walk about the room. The child ignored her. Reaching Ruth’s area, she saw the beads and bells, clock and paintings, sear in another flash. So much that glimmered. And there the mirror she had given Ruth. The mirror had changed.

Not entering, Rachaela craned to see.

‘What have you done to your mirror?’

‘I painted it.’

Another blast of blue. All the glass was covered, fields and meadows, flowers and clouds, and distant mountains in a mist.

Chapter Thirteen

She had bought the bathroom mirror soon after moving into the flat. It hung the length of the wall. As the bath ran, a fog of steam began to cling to its surface. Rachaela wiped it away. Through the frosted window blazed the cold light of winter morning; sidelight, the most harsh. Rachaela examined her face and body.

She was forty. She did not look it. She looked the same as when she had been twenty-nine, before the birth of the child. Even that had not touched her. No stretch marks, no cellulite, the belly and thighs firm and white and smooth, the breasts full and yet high, the nipples small and rosy. The neck was unlined, the face unlined, the brow and cheeks. The chin was firm. No pouches about the mouth or under the eyes. The face and body of a young, young woman. And in the black hair, the black hair of the groin, not a single silver coil.

It did not please her. She tried not to let it unnerve her. She was used to it, saw it every day. She accepted such remarks as Jonquil’s, ‘But you’re only a kid.’ Even Denise had aged a little, got heavy and puffy in her thirties, from the big cooked dinners she made for hungry Keith. Jonquil had not herself changed very much, her skin had only grown harder and more obdurate, she had swapped the steel earring for an earring of bone, and all her hair was grey.

Probably I’ll age suddenly.

That might happen. It happened in books.

People did not notice youngness when they saw you constantly, the same as the alteration into age went largely unobserved, only picked out in sudden revelations.

‘What are you, you must be about twenty-eight now,’ Jonquil had said last year, not bothering with an answer.

The child had changed, of course.

Ruth grew out of all her clothes with punctilious regularity. She had breasts and two small brassieres that must be hand-washed.