There is a famous house on Folgate Street in Spitalfields, about fifteen minutes’ walk from me (or twenty if pushing a buggy one-handed and trailing a child on a scooter). It belonged to a man named Denis Severs, and he left it as a museum of sorts – part-museum, part-art installation – with the intention that, as you walk through the doors, you feel that you are stepping through the surface of a painting. 91The house’s ten rooms are ten ‘spells’, from the cellar and the piano nobile to the smoking room and the boudoir, transporting you back to the Huguenot silk-weavers who first lived there in the early eighteenth century, and on through the Victorian era, following the family’s – and society’s – fortunes. The porcelain, the portraits, the clink of the old brass clock: it feels as if the house’s real inhabitants have just momentarily left the room that you’ve stepped into. Or so the website says. You cannot wear stiletto heels or heavily ridged soles on your visit; it goes without saying that you cannot bring a buggy, or a boisterous child. They have night-time openings, which are called Silent Nights, where you leave your phone at the door, and general admission on Sundays and Mondays. My husband leaves work at lunchtime to come and look after the children in a nearby park so I can see the house. But somehow I’ve misread the website. It’s a Wednesday: the house is closed.

They were not like us, the historian at Girton College said. We often think of the Victorians as basically the same as us, a bit stricter, more sentimental, maybe, but they were not like us at all. Imagine that almost everything we believe, all that we take for granted, is overturned. That’s how far we are from them, that distance and then some again.

They tell you to allow a whole half-day for the clinic. There are ultrasounds, mammograms, radiographers, registrars to see; pieces of pink and white paper to be taken to different 92reception desks on different floors, filed in different buff-coloured folders. I find a corner seat, then move when I realise it’s by a rack of leaflets with titles such as: Cancer and Pregnancy, and Preparing a Child for Loss. The clinic is also the oncology centre and there are women here at every stage of treatment, from potential diagnoses to full-blown weekly chemo. There are women in wheelchairs, bloated with steroids. A woman my age takes the seat beside me and smiles brightly, about to start up conversation. She is wearing a hospital gown and has a cannula taped to the back of her left hand. I look away and make random marks in the margins of my sheaf of papers until I sense her resolve, or solidarity, waning.