She wondered again if she might ask Mrs Dunlevy for help—sometimes it seemed within her power to do so. At other times the utter impossibility of it struck her dumb.

A great thud from above caused them both to look sharply upwards and a shower of dust and earth came tumbling down so that Alice wondered if the ceiling might choose this very moment to finally descend on them, or if God Himself might decide to bring the roof down, for He seemed set fair on this path of cruelty where Milli was concerned.

But the ceiling did not come down. Not yet.

How many of them lived up there? Alice wondered. The woman, whose name was Mrs Renfrew and who had four or five barefoot, clamouring offspring crowded about her legs and a newborn in her arms, had spoken a civil word to her once when no one else had.

And all the time the hopelessness swelled and surged about them, but whereas Alice struggled to keep her head above the rising tide, Milli submitted to its inevitability, or this was how it seemed to Alice. She watched as her sister pushed at the matted clumps of hair that obscured her face. This was the same Milli who had once sat on a bed with a mirror in one hand and a hairbrush in the other, brushing and brushing her beautiful, soft and shining chestnut hair and arranging it and rearranging it, getting up and flouncing about the room because some lad had called out to her in the street and another had whistled at her from a tram. Milli, turning this way and that, trying to see herself full length in a mirror that showed you only your face and Alice watching her, perched on the bed and clapping her hands and laughing, and their mother seated in her chair with her withered and broken body, her eyes sunken and dulled, shaking her head and muttering dire warnings. For Mrs Nimrod had lived a life already and she had seen what happened to a girl’s dreams and hopes once some man came along, and when your own life had been spoiled you did not have it left inside you to let your own child have her life. Alice had not seen it at the time—a delighted observer of her sister’s exploits, a dreamer of her own future exploits—but she saw it now.

She looked away.

‘What is to be done?’ she said at length. And then, remembering: ‘Milli, the place at Pitt Street, the Benevolent Asylum, you must go there.’

It was where the women went for their lying-in, or it had been when Alice had grown up in streets not so far away, where the sorts of women who needed such places sometimes lived.

But Milli’s face was set hard. ‘I went there first day I got here,’ she said. ‘It was full.’

‘Full? But surely—’