‘I tried. I kept trying. But however urgently my hands moulded and remoulded it, it would not take any kind of admirable human form. It was deformed – hunched and bowed, with fat limbs, a too-large head and a sad face. I worked on and on and the rain stopped and I was weary beyond any imagining. I recalled Mary Shelley’s terrifying evocation of the birth of Frankenstein’s Monster. I was appalled by what I had made. I took up the golem and threw it into the hot ashes of the fire.’

Emmeline had paused here and come to sit at Jane’s feet. She took another sip of laudanum and offered Jane the jar and she drank, too. They did not speak. Jane felt the laudanum’s instantaneous consolation enter her blood. She took her aunt’s hand and held it tenderly. She knew the story had not reached its end.

After some time had passed in silence, Emmeline continued: ‘I went back to my room and lay down. I fell asleep and didn’t wake till morning. And when the morning came I remembered what had happened and I got up and went and stared at the ashes of the fire. I expected to find that the golem had burned away, but of course it had not. It was merely baked as though it had been put in a potter’s oven. It had refused to die.

‘I fetched a clean cloth and wrapped it round the thing and brought it onto my lap. I rubbed it to get the ashes away. It was hard and brittle and cracked here and there, but I cradled it in my arms. I felt that I loved it.’

‘You loved it? When you made it, it dismayed you, but now you felt love for it?’

‘Yes. And in that feeling of love was great consolation. I had been so unhappy – to lose my babies and then to lose my lover. And some of that sadness … I felt it leave me. I felt I could go on with my life and my work.’

Emmeline had got up and begun to walk about the room. Jane’s eyes followed her passage from the couch to the window and back to the laudanum jar.

‘That is the end of the story,’ said Emmeline. ‘I used to think there might have been something magical, something supernatural in it, but now I see that it was just a sequence of events which led abruptly to an ending. So I tell you it only to stress my belief that our minds can be consoled by the strangest things. And it told me also that we cannot shape the world according to the delights society decrees appropriate for us. We must be unconventional in our joys and find them wherever we can.’

‘That is my reasoning, too,’ said Jane. Then she asked, ‘Do you still have the little golem, Aunt Emmeline?’

‘Yes,’ said Emmeline. ‘I keep it in an old wooden shoe-box, shaped much like a coffin. When I look at it, I still feel tenderness towards it.’