Kathleen sat near to him, playing with a pack of Tarot cards, whose predictions she did not fully understand, swearing at the figures as she turned them up. All around her, disorder accumulated. Unwashed crockery stood about in piles. Dirty clothes and bedding lay soaking in tin pails, never washed nor hung out to dry. Behind the chicken wire of the larder door, bread grew a patina of blue mould and potatoes put forth fibrous green shoots, quite as though the over-heated air was thickening itself into earth.

Worst of all, Clorinda saw, was the state of the other child, the younger child, Aisling. It was as though Michael and Kathleen had forgotten her existence, or, if they remembered it, treated it as though they had no obligation towards her. Aisling was eleven years old, but refused to go to school and the parents were too indifferent, it seemed, to care about this. They just sent her out into the cold street, to play on her own or with the toddlers who staggered about the road, chasing rats and squirrels, sitting down in puddles and laughing with woe. When she was allowed back into the apartment, she went to her mother and father each in turn, hoping to be hugged by them and they held her to them for a brief moment before they sent her to her room, the room she had once shared with the dead Maire, there to curl up on her bed with her toy pig, staring at nothing.

Clorinda could not bear the look of sadness on Aisling’s face. She took the pails of washing into the communal laundry room in the basement beneath the tenement house. She set water on to boil on a blackened range. Then she came back and found carbolic soap and a washboard and took these into Aisling’s room. She knelt down by the bed and took the toy pig out of the child’s hand and gave her the soap. She said, ‘would you like to help me perform a miracle?’

In the end, Clorinda had to bribe Aisling with money, but she told herself that this did not matter. Now, together, they soaped and scrubbed and pounded the washing: a penny for a shirt, two farthings for a pair of drawers, threepence for a petticoat, sixpence for a sheet. Very quickly, they grew hot and their hair became wild and rebellious in the steam, but they both felt strangely enthralled by the quantity of work they had to get through and they kept on for more than four hours, till most of it was clean and rinsed and hung up to dry.

Their hands were red and sore. They were hungry and parched. Clorinda returned to the room where Michael and Kathleen sat unmoving, snatched up her purse and two bonnets and went back to Aisling, whose pale face was now scarlet and smiling. Smoothing her own hair and that of the child, she crammed the bonnets onto their heads and led them out into the late afternoon, where a pale sun laid upon the empty street an unfamiliar glance of beauty.