But when the morning arrived and the invalids came shuffling to the pool in their white shifts, they did not behave as the golem had predicted. So strange was its appearance to them that they shrank from the creature. They believed it to be evil. They would not let it near to them. It tried to speak, to reassure them that it only wanted to help them, but its clay lips kept sticking together, impeding sound.

The stewards of the Baths were summoned. They approached the golem and tried to pick it up and throw it into the street, but it let its muddy feet stick to the stones around the Bath, so that they couldn’t move it. One of them shot it with a pistol but now it dragged its feet from the tiles and ran away. It smoothed its own wet clay over the pistol wound. It searched for a hiding place and crawled under a laurel bush. When the night came, the golem looked up through the laurel leaves and saw the beauty of the stars and wondered deep in its minuscule heart how it might predict the fabric of the world and the people in it – whether their souls were filled with starlight or with darkness.

What did it know of good or evil or sorrow? It only knew that it carried a burden. In its ugly body resided all the children who had never had a chance at life. And on their behalf, it had to fulfil its mission, which was to heal and comfort. But how was it to do this, if people feared it and wanted to wound or kill it? The golem looked up once more at the stars, but couldn’t see them. They were now covered by cloud. Rain began to pelt upon the golem from the shiny laurel leaves and it began to understand that the rain could eventually turn its body into a shapeless form. It would soon be a mere lump of mud. And it looked around, in desperation, for protection from the sky …

By the time Jane had got this far with her story, her body was no longer cold in the studio, but warmed to a beautiful heat by her immersion in creative fire. The dawn was breaking above the skylight and she set aside the sketchbook. She was tired and her head ached but she thought that she had seldom felt so happy. She asked herself if this was the Thing, the destiny towards which she had believed herself to be travelling throughout her life, and her feelings of joy in discovering her story at first suggested to her that it might be. But then she decided that her stubborn belief in a ‘Thing’ had probably been a deceiving and sentimental one – like the dreamy aspirations of innocent young girls, who could not yet understand that life seldom arranged itself around such self-congratulatory moments of arrival. Or if, sometimes, it did, then those moments quickly passed and all that remained to do was simply to struggle on down a long road upon which darkness would always threaten to encroach. But this didn’t matter to Jane. She knew she had found a way forward and all that she asked of herself was to travel on with hope.