I couldn’t now remember how nannies behaved towards their charges; certainly no form of words came to me. Formality had been invented to ease those situations in which human beings find they have little in common and less to say to each other, so I said ‘How are you, Margaret?’ in a tone of great politeness.

She answered in her clear little voice, ‘I’m very well, thank you.’

She showed no surprise at seeing me in her room, and no sign of fear. I wondered if she might be in shock and tentatively touched her hand. It was cold, but then so was the room; the window open top and bottom, the curtains drifting at their moorings in the night wind. I was silent and so was she. How could I ask whether she had overheard her mother trying to kill her father and whether she had minded very greatly?

She turned her head slightly to look at me but, it seemed, not in appeal—more as a well-bred adult might gaze at a stranger who had stayed too long and seemed to have no further purpose in remaining.

I said, ‘Why don’t you jump back into bed, Margaret?’

She obeyed at once and lay on her back, quite still. She was very small, her body scarcely perceptible under the bedclothes and I thought that in the circumstances I should take her in my arms and reassure her, but it would have appeared presumptuous. She was so self-possessed and undemanding.

I said, ‘I’m going downstairs to wait for Mummy. I won’t go away.’ I wanted to tell her some comforting lie—‘Mummy came round to borrow a cup of sugar but we couldn’t find any so she’s still looking’, or ‘Mummy and I got bored with our own houses so we decided to change places for the evening’. There was no suitable lie, no explanation, and the truth seemed wholly inappropriate for that quiet child.

There was a book lying on the table beside her bed and I picked it up. It was full of brightly coloured pictures of birds and I turned over the pages. ‘Oh, look at the robin, Margaret,’ I said, feeling an awful fool. ‘And here’s a duck with its babies.’

To my surprise she sat up a little and leaned over to look at this tiresome duck.

Encouraged, I flicked through the illustrations of tits, starlings, wagtails until I came to a picture of a kingfisher, and suddenly faced with that vivid, unearthly green-blue I was back in the country by a deep tree-shaded river pool and there was a kingfisher lying, startling in death, on the shoaly brink; one small, flat space just large enough to contain it. I spoke without thinking, or spoke my thoughts aloud: ‘I found a dead kingfisher once.’

She stared at me unblinkingly and said, ‘It couldn’t fly.’

‘No,’ I agreed, feeling more than foolish now.

She had leaned further over to look more closely at the picture and then settled back on her pillows.