The room had become dark, but the hallway outside was brightly lit so that the opening door cast light into her room and, for a startling moment, the slight figure of the maid, Alice, appeared immense and monstrous.

No servant was ever quite invisible. Alice, who had the features of utter banality and unremarkability true to her class but a face which ought to have been free of expression and somehow never was, had never achieved invisibility. She stood now quite motionless in the doorway, not speaking, her face and hands an extension of the plain black dress and starched white apron, collar and cuffs she wore so that it was not at once clear where the uniform ended and the girl began. Her shoulders were a little stooped, a strand of hair had worked its way loose from her cap, her hands hung at her sides as though lost without something to carry.

‘The curtains, madam,’ she said at last.

If the kitchen had caught on fire, or a ship wrecked in the bay, one imagined she would announce it in just the same tone.

But this evening two bright red spots showed clearly, one on each side of her face.

The girl plunged into the room. She made for the window, drawing the curtains then pausing to caress the thick crimson velvet, smoothing it out so the folds fell just so. She stood back as though to admire them, though she must have drawn them and opened them every day of her life for the last five years, and nothing about the way they fell this evening was different to how they had fallen any other day of those five years.

‘Thank you, Alice.’

But Alice did not leave. Alice remained where she was, taking up so little space yet taking up all the space in the room.

‘Was there something else?’

Those livid spots on either side of her face.

The girl must be unwell or she wanted an afternoon off or she had broken some piece of china. Was she giving her notice? But, no, apparently it was none of these things, as Alice bobbed a brief curtsy in the vague direction of the window and said, ‘No, madam.’

The door clicked shut behind her. Eleanor let out her breath. A slight weight of oppression slid away. She stared at the window. Though it was obscured now by the thick crimson curtains, she could still hear the rain lashing the pane.

A hatbox lay opened on the bed, a number of pairs of gloves laid out beside it.

It was monstrous that one should have to go out in this weather.