The day after the accident, when at last she had been able to speak and make some sense, she had said, ‘Death’s taking me a piece at a time,’ and she had wept so piteously Una had had to turn away, afraid of what the words moved in her, the sorrow that burned behind her own eyes. Here, with the Valentines, she had strayed across the line. She had dropped her guard and in the end she would pay the price for it, grieving on her own without the comfort of a family around her. It was a failure they had been warned against in training. Inappropriate emotion. It was unprofessional, and it didn’t really help anyone, didn’t make her a better nurse. But how were you supposed to control it? You couldn’t give the heart orders – thus far and no farther. It wasn’t human.

She squeezed Alice’s hand and folded down the sheets to check for signs of bedsores, discovering on her back – the coccyx – a patch of irritated skin, which she treated with the Granuflex. The whole puzzle of Alice’s skeleton was visible now. The long bones jutting against her skin, her eyes sunk into the sockets of her skull. She had taken no solids since the fall, so her body scavenged on itself, eking out another week or month with scraps of protein, lipids, a last swirl of glucose. Life, which a child could dab out with the pressure of her thumb, was also mystifyingly persistent, the flesh outliving the will, all pleasure, all usefulness, going on and on in the grip of some biochemical imperative, something fashioned right at the start, before we had bigger brains or better hands. Sheer blind tenacity.