Her aunts had been loving and attentive and she had never had the heart - or worked up the hurtful malice - to let them or anybody else know the aching void she felt inside herself, no matter how many times she had lain in tears in her bed, rehearsing the words she would use to do just that.

She supposed she might have transferred some of her need for a parent to her father, but she had scarcely felt that he was a part of her life; he was just another man who came to the house, sometimes stayed for a while, played with her and was kind and even loving, but (she had known instinctively at first, and later admitted rationally to herself after a few years of self-delusion) had played, been kind and even loved her in a more cheerily vague and off-hand sort of way than many of her uncles; she imagined now that he had loved her in his own fashion and had enjoyed being with her, and assuredly she had felt a certain warmth at the time, but still, before very long, even as an infant, before she knew the precise reasons, motives and desires involved, she had guessed that the frequency and length of his visits to the house had more to do with his interest in one or two of her aunts than in any abiding tenderness he felt towards his daughter.

Her mother returned now and again, for visits that for both of them veered wildly between painful feelings of love and furious rages of resentment. Somehow, later, exhausted and dismayed by these sapping, abrasive, attriting episodes, they came to a sort of truce; but it was at the expense of any closeness.

By the time her mother returned for good, she was like just another girlfriend; they both had better friends.

So she had always been alone. And she suspected, she almost knew, that she would end her days alone. It was a source of sadness - though she tried never to wallow in self-pity - and even, in a subsidiary way, of shame, for at the back of her mind she could not escape the nagging desire for somebody - some man, if she was honest with herself - to come to her rescue, to take her away from the vacuum that was her existence and make her no longer alone. It was something she had never been able to confess to anybody, and yet something that she had an inkling was known to the people and machines who had allowed her to assume this exalted, if onerous position.