Before the curfew the young mothers would spend their days, weather allowing, sitting on the edge of the fountain, chatting to each other. They would compare their children, the particular qualities of their own motherhood, the transformations, like welcome slippages, in their bodies. They would speak about their own lives, how they would rear their coming infants; they would talk about the rush of feelings that would come upon them, unpredictable, expansive and sudden. They shared their secret knowledge, their voices always easy and gentle, but Dervorgilla shared none of these emotions. They were so happy in their stillness, so firm in their postures, that Ambrosio, a travelling hawker who passed through once a year selling and repairing wind vanes and unctuous oils for scabs and the repelling of fleas and lice, had joked that these mothers were the best sundials the town had ever had. Once he had said this, Dervorgilla had examined their hunched forms and shadows they threw, and she found that even the shadows crawled obsequiously around the mothers’ bodies. Even the shadows respected them, just like the town did. Dervorgilla, looking at her own shadow, just saw a misshapen darkness that could not be read. She felt hounded, but at the same time felt that no one paid her any attention. She believed that somehow, when the women looked at her, with some intuition completely foreign to her, they knew she was a terrible mother, and she could not stand it. She had known these girls, suddenly women, their whole lives, and still she could not ingratiate herself amongst them. After birthing, they were like new, better people, and she was still lost. They were as tired as her, but their tiredness had a kind of sense to it. Theirs was a soothing tiredness, an enveloping calm. Hers was an edgy fatigue, as though she was constantly hungover. When she spoke to them, she found her own words awkward and forced. She felt their stares become spooked, or offended, when they regarded her, and she would blush and turn away. They found her bizarre; she felt herself a fat pig amongst them, glandular, lunar, crazy. She was the youngest of them; they did not respect her, and she prayed for the rainy days that kept them all inside.

‘I know they are talking about me,’ she had said to Tedbalt, her husband, one evening after she had spent the whole afternoon fretting about the room.

‘Who cares as much as you about anything as you care about everything?’ Tedbalt had replied. ‘People don’t think about themselves as much as you think about them. And what are they to us? Their opinions are nothing. We know them, and we will know them our whole lives, so why worry?’