Her interview is the following day and tonight she’ll stay in digs. The train arrives at four o’clock. Time to wander, to window shop in the streets between Liverpool Street and Soho. But when she emerges into the road above Liverpool Street station, the flutter and cacophony make her change her mind and she drags her case and folio back down the stairs and down again to the tube station and takes the underground to Pimlico. The Thames glimmers in the distance as she walks towards it.

In the gallery, she seeks out Turner’s Snow Storm – Steam-boat off a Harbour’s Mouth. It’s smaller than she’d expected. It’s just a painting. Deflated, she slumps down on the bench in front of it and tears finally fall, streaking down her face. The painting begins to bleed and swim in her tired, bleary eyes and the dark brush strokes detach themselves from the two-dimensional surface and envelop her. She remembers what Jack had said about it. It was wild. She doesn’t know what or who he was but he has given her this.

Back on the Embankment, the sun is low in the sky. Without a watch, she has no idea how long she has sat in front of the painting. The Thames is darkening and she peers down it, listening to the chug of a boat somewhere beyond her sight. She feels the great machinery of the city carrying on beyond her and without her and she wants to stay there on the banks of the Thames forever, and never venture back into the bowels of the throbbing beast of the city. Somehow, she has broken free of her moorings and is now untethered and a feeling of lightness comes over her as she leans on the bank. Across the river, lights come on in a squat building and are reflected in droplets of gold in the eddying water.

This last year has been a series of humiliations and catastrophes one after the other as if her life had been ripped from its moorings and flung out into a storm-wild sea to be bashed senseless on the rocks. Everything has been taken away from her. Perhaps it is her fault they have gone – her mother, Jack, the baby; she did not love enough; she has been careless. She was gazing so hard at her own image that she did not see what she had done to Arthur. On the banks of the Thames, she is so light with grief she could float away, disappear underneath the dancing lights. She could drift away on the ebb tide to the estuary, to the sea, reach oblivion, like her mother did. She sways slightly on the backs of her feet. Everything that has happened, everything she has done, has marked her, the way the flood left behind a tide mark of scum, and the white scouring on the fields. It’s marked but not defeated her.