‘What’s that on your hand?’ said Sophia. ‘Is it measles?’

‘I don’t think so. My hands itch when I’ve touched the wet sheets.’

‘You’re in the wrong job. Do you have your period yet?’

‘What?’

‘You know. Bleeding.’

‘Yes. Yes. My mother gave me some of her old …’ It was one of the few things Carina had done for her.

‘Her old what?’

‘Nothing. How old are you, Sophia?’

‘Seventeen.’

‘What will you do next?’

‘Next? God knows. Find a job better than this place. Find a husband one day. A rich man so I don’t have to wash dirty sheets.’

Lena thought of Stefan in his room in Trieste. It would be good to be married to someone like him.

‘You’ll be all right,’ said Sophia. ‘When you’re older.’ She laughed. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve been with a boy yet.’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘When I was in the first orphanage there was a boy used to come to our dormitory at night. He had this …’ She leaned and whispered in Lena’s ear. ‘We used to take turns touching it.’

Lena barely understood.

‘Don’t be a fool,’ said Sophia. ‘It’s all quite natural, you know. How do you think you came into the world?’

‘I was … I was born in the hospital. But my father lived a long way away.’

‘Got no brothers, have you?’

‘No.’

‘Did you know boys at school?’

‘Not really.’ Lukas.

‘There must have been some!’

‘Yes, but we weren’t friends.’

‘Ever met any men?’

‘Yes … Yes, of course.’ Herr Gustav. The apple seller in the market. Stefan, her father. The wharf worker with the blue shirt. Rudolf Plischke.

‘It’s all they think about. Men. When they see you. Maybe not you, not yet. But when you get to my age. Know what they want to do?’

Lena shook her head and turned away, but Sophia held her tight round the shoulders and whispered in her ear.

‘That’s all they think about. Day and night.’

‘I don’t believe you,’ said Lena.

‘You’ll see. With your own eyes. You will.’

Lena pictured what Sophia had described and began to laugh. It was too ridiculous. It was impossible to believe that sober grown-up people would do these things. But some remembered moments from her early childhood – heavy footsteps, a second glass on the table, her mother’s startled face – took the edge off the humour.

In her work in the laundry and in the course of her walk to and from the hospital, Lena began to see a world beyond her home and the schoolroom. Her mother had told her to distrust and, if possible, avoid other people, and this was the basis from which she began. By the time she was sixteen, however, she had begun to think that the lessons of her own experience counted as much as her mother’s advice.

‘Now that I’m sixteen, I’m going to work in a café,’ she told Sophia one day.

‘Where?’