In the kitchen Mrs Flynn had looked up and observed her with a thoughtful and disapproving silence that spoke of a hundred young maids who had engineered their own downfalls and in whose image she clearly saw Alice. Then she had packed her bag, pulled on her coat and left for the day. Mrs Dunlevy had returned from a fitting at her dressmaker and gone at once to dress for dinner. Sometime later Mr Dunlevy had returned. Alice had missed the moment of his return as, in a sudden terror of what she might find, she had run upstairs to her room, where she had scooped up the baby, motionless and silent and wrapped in the shawl, knowing it was dead but finding it lived still.

She was frightened to leave it. Had stood at the window as Mr and Mrs Dunlevy had departed in diamonds and silk, leaving her alone in the house with the baby that did not thrive.

She unbuttoned her dress and placed the baby’s mouth to her breast but no milk came. So she carried up milk from the kitchen in a cup and dipped her finger into the milk and placed her finger on the baby’s lips, inside its mouth, over its gums, but the tiny, squirming, wriggling thing dribbled the liquid out, it turned its head away, it wailed in fury. She tried a dab of sugar on its lips, and honey too, and finally, in desperation, a drop of gin from a bottle she found on the lowest shelf of a cupboard in the scullery. The baby would not take it; it seemed not to know how to feed, how to swallow, and Alice held it and her body became as stiff as the baby’s. It shamed her to realise she did not know how to care for it. Would she know, she wondered, if she had given birth to it?

The crying became louder and fear shook her body.

She did not know what to do.