Her vision blurred and her stomach was retching. ‘Sorry,’ she choked and, clutching her mouth before she was sick on the kitchen floor, she ran to the bathroom and vomited the pathetic amount of tea, toast and marmalade she had managed to keep down, into the sink.

*

After she cleaned herself up she told them not to worry, it was probably just a bug. But she excused herself and went to bed. At some point that day, she no longer remembered exactly when, she stared at her reflection in her mother’s dressing room mirror and felt the force of the truth. For she had truly got herself in a mess. The sickness, the tenderness of her breasts, her revulsion at the smells and taste of food, her jags of crying; the undeniable fact that her cycle had stopped. She had known all this but it had been easy to explain away. She had been ill; she was sick with grief. Go and see a doctor, she imagined someone saying. Someone who cared about her, someone who noticed the changes in her. But there was no one to do that. And she couldn’t go to a doctor – the family doctor was a bald, jowly man who’d reluctantly gone over to the National Health Service – but the thought of him and his fat fingers examining her – no. The shame of it. She couldn’t face it. Oh Mother, she prayed, tell me what to do. But the looking-glass only reflected her own bloated, blotched face swimming in a blurry film. She felt as if she was underwater, trapped, with no access to air. Is this what drowning felt like, Mother? You meant to do it, didn’t you? She, Verity, should have drowned in the flood, along with Jack. Silly girl, she chided. But that was it: she would drown the thing inside her, make it go away, flush it out. She had a dim memory of a girl at school talking about gin and hot baths. Downstairs was quiet. It wasn’t tea yet and the men were out. Mrs Timms was in town shopping for supper. She could do it right now.

She crept downstairs and turned the immersion heater on for the hot water and went to the drinks cabinet in the parlour. There was a half-empty bottle of gin. She held it in a shaking hand. Maybe it had to be hot too. She warmed a big glassful in a pan on the stove, praying that no one would come in. Then she scrubbed the pan, refilled the bottle with water to the level it had been, returned it to the cabinet and went upstairs with the hot glass wrapped in a tea towel.