Whatever it was had woken me up. How long had I been asleep? I couldn’t quite say. Was I too late? I didn’t know. I brushed myself down a bit, parted my hair, telling myself if I’m to have any chance of seeing her I must hurry. I opened my bedroom door. What was outside? The night was. I walked into it.

I could not find her at first. She was not in the common room, that fireplace had already been laid. She was not in any of the schoolrooms. At last, down a deep corridor so thick with night that my small candle was nearly choked on it, there she was and there was the quiet, so quiet, words coming from her bonnet, I heard amongst the other objects in that room Patrick Wellens and Jenny McMannister (a fire grate and a bell jar) some other slight whispering. She was in the Sun Room, but she was not making the fireplace, she was wiping the windows.

‘Whatever are you doing?’ I asked.

‘Don’t creep up on me like that! Not unless you want a shovel across your ear.’

‘I thought you did the fireplaces.’

‘I wanted to look out,’ she said.

‘Should you be doing that? I mean, is it right? I mean, won’t you be in trouble?’

‘Who does the windows in this house? They’re shocking.’

‘They probably thought it wasn’t worthwhile. It all gets covered over so quickly.’

‘I just want to see out, I can’t open the window, it’s bolted down …’

‘Well, you see, otherwise the gulls will come in.’

‘I thought if I gave one a good scrub maybe I’d see something, anything really, just something, out.’

‘You do know that it’s probably worse on the other side.’

‘I hadn’t thought of that.’

‘That’s one of the problems, living in a dustheap as we do, there’s so much dust and soot and ash, it does tend to get everywhere. If you step out just for a minute and then come back inside and blow your nose, well then your snot is rather black. It gets everywhere, the dust, all over, not just the house, people too.’

‘So there’s really not much point then in cleaning the window.’

‘Not much I shouldn’t think.’

‘But it might make the room just a little lighter. Mightn’t it?’

‘I suppose it shouldn’t make it any darker.’

‘Let us try then.’

‘Me? You can’t mean me, I’m an Iremonger.’

‘Yes, you can help.’

‘Oh,’ I said, and, ‘all right then.’