But Alice walked up and down the kitchen with the baby and the words My sister is dead, which might have changed something or might have changed nothing at all, remained unsaid.

‘Suit yourself,’ said Mrs Renfrew, and she was gone. But the odour she had brought with her remained for a long time.

For a moment Alice did not move. Her sister’s baby was a weight in her arms so heavy she could hardly bear it and at the same time was so light, so tentative, a thing of gossamer and air, that it seemed it might slip away and be gone, and how these two things could both be so she did not know.

A noise from the main part of the house stirred her and a fear that lately was always present, if occasionally dulled and vague, flared. If Mrs Dunlevy came into the kitchen now—

But Mrs Dunlevy never came into the kitchen. Why should she come now, today?

Alice crept into the hallway, kissing the crown of the baby’s head though hardly aware that she did so. She heard voices from the drawing room, Mr and Mrs Dunlevy, and she darted past the door and up the stairs and no one came out, no one called her name. When she reached her own room at the top of the house she paused, calming herself, waiting for the baby to wake, but it did not.

She lay the baby in a drawer, lining it first with newspaper. She left it sleeping and went downstairs and she wondered why it was that God had chosen her, why Father McCreadie had come for her and not for Milli, why it was she who was saved. And the baby too; perhaps the baby was saved. It was strange to her.

In the hallway Alice took up the boots Mrs Dunlevy had discarded and studied them. They were covered in mud. It was a shame, for they were lovely things. If she could she would make them nice again. If she made the boots as good as new, and if she thought very hard about how God had saved her, how God had saved Milli’s baby, then it was alright that later tonight she was going to hand the baby over and not see it again for years, perhaps. She wondered if this was why God had saved her: so that she might save Milli’s baby. If Father McCreadie was here she would ask him, though she had not set eyes on him in five years and had never wanted to ask him a question about God before. She imagined herself asking her question now and she tried to think what answer Father McCreadie might give.

He would not know the answer. He would make up some lie.