Once in the kitchen, Mrs Duffy pointed to one of the four chairs set under a scrubbed wooden table. ‘Sit yourself down and take a breath,’ she said briskly but not unkindly. ‘Bit of a shock, was it, Ellie going off like that? She didn’t give you any warning then?’

Ruby shook her head, gazing about her covertly. The kitchen wasn’t what she had expected, not with Mrs Duffy being the way she appeared. Certainly when she and Ellie had moved into their room it had been in a poor state, and the hall was always grubby, the lino rarely scrubbed and the brown walls dismal. But the kitchen was clean enough and had an air of comfort to it, a big rocking chair with padded cushions set to one side of the blackleaded range and the thick nets at the window white and starched into stiff folds. A small potted plant stood in the middle of the table with shiny green leaves and little white flowers, and all one wall was covered in paintings, one or two of them framed but mostly fixed with drawing pins. Ruby stared at one picture of a young girl in a meadow full of daisies and buttercups; it was alive with colour and warmth and involuntarily she said, ‘Oh, that’s beautiful. The picture, Mrs Duffy, it’s lovely. They all are.’

‘Aye, grand, aren’t they.’

‘Who painted them, if you don’t mind me asking?’

‘I don’t mind, lass. It was me son, Michael. He had a gift that way.’ Mrs Duffy paused in making the tea and gazed at the pictures with her. ‘He was a good boy, none better. If he had lived he would have been a fine painter.’

‘He – he died?’

‘On his sixteenth birthday, two days after me husband passed. It was the influenza that took them, nearly thirty years ago now. I’d had a job to fall for our Michael and there were no more after him but me and me husband were content with him, he was one in a million.’

‘I’m so sorry, Mrs Duffy.’ For the last two years she had thought her landlady cold and unfeeling, and all the time she’d had this great sorrow to bear.

Mrs Duffy looked at her. ‘Nearly went barmy for a time,’ she said quietly, ‘but you bear what has to be borne, don’t you. The good book says, “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, blessed be the name of the Lord,” but it was a long time before I could bless Him again, I don’t mind saying. Still have me black days even now.’

‘Oh, Mrs Duffy.’ It just showed you never really knew anyone else.