‘Mrs Walker thinks that Ruth was trying on makeup,’ said powderless Miss Barrett, her unpainted eyes and lips wide with shock.

‘Perhaps she was,’ said Rachaela, for a moment almost intrigued. She herself had done something similar when she had played truant, but then she was thirteen or fourteen.

‘The thing is, Mrs Day, this is very serious. You must speak to Ruth and impress upon her that she has to come to school. She’s been absent several days this month. She has an important test next year, and she needs to pay attention. She’s very much a dreamer. A lot of talent in art, though some of her paintings, well. But she needs to pull her socks up. She must attend.’

‘I’ll speak to her.’

‘Ruth must come to school. If she doesn’t, Mr Walker will have to take further steps.’

‘I see.’

Miss Barrett was rouged after all by indignation.

Throwing her chances away,’ she said. School was very important, a life jacket in chaos. She looked actually frightened.

Rachaela had not offered her anything to drink, and let her go to the door unaided, pulling on her ridiculous gloves, until she looked like a parody of a bear.

‘And if she has to stay away,’ said Miss Barrett, ‘we really must have a note.’

Rachaela ate tomatoes on toast for lunch, and pictured Ruth eating her sandwiches on some wall or in a park.

She must finally have become bored with school. Rachaela knew she could read well but was virtually innumerate. This had been so in Emma’s day, and was so still, for once or twice Ruth had asked Rachaela some arithmetical question which Rachaela also found impossible to answer. Ruth had trouble even in adding up. ‘How many apples are there left?’ Rachaela had recently asked her. Ruth studied the bowl. ‘I don’t know, Mummy.’ There were seven. The child paid for things in shops by giving always a large coin, or a note. She would bring her loose change to Rachaela for translation into fifty-pence pieces and pounds.

Perhaps it was wrong to feel empathy with Ruth simply because she too had played truant.

Yet Rachaela saw the brief daylight ebb with a slight amusement, waiting for Ruth to appear punctually, as if just coming home from school.

The child manifested in the cold street. Rachaela thought of the day she had seen her in the snow, the day Emma had bowed out from their lives with urgent smiles. Poor useful Emma.

How different, now, was Ruth.