Outside there seemed to be no stars in the sky and she could not recall the last time she had searched for them. One night, she could not have been more than seven or eight, her father had come to the room in which she slept and had woken her in the darkness and taken her up to the roof where they had lain for an hour or more with blankets covering them, for it had been a cold, clear night, and watched a meteor shower overhead. Tiny points of light bursting into life and shooting across the sky then blinking out of existence, one after another in every part of the sky, so fleeting you caught them in the corner of your eye and they were gone. She remembered how it felt to share this secret with him, for it had seemed, at the time, like a secret.

And then he had gone, and so long ago that his voice, his smile, his smell, was as fleeting as those shooting stars had once been. Her mother had gone three years later of a silly nagging cough that had seemed little enough at first but which worsened and in a fortnight had carried her off.

They had been a safety net, her mother and father, she saw. A fixed point upon which to anchor oneself, and when they were gone that anchor point was gone too, and one drifted, untethered, with nothing beneath. And sometimes that was liberating and other times it was terrifying.

Your husband becomes your safety net, that was what her mother had said. It was the sort of thing she might have said, at any rate. Though in her case both her husbands had, one after another and some years apart, and through no fault of their own one presumed, deserted her.

But they had died. A different form of desertion. After which one might don widow’s weeds, accept condolences and, after an appropriate period, move on.

Eleanor pondered the time, estimated it to be seven or perhaps eight o’clock. Certainly long after dusk and yet her fire was not lit and her curtains not drawn.

Afterwards the two things seemed connected in her mind: her realisation about the fire and curtains, and a moment later, almost simultaneously it seemed, the sound of a baby crying upstairs. But it might not have happened like that; it may have been some little time between the first thing and the second. Afterwards, it was difficult to recall with any certainty.

A baby was crying upstairs. It was such an unlikely sound that it took an absurdly long time for Eleanor’s brain to register and make sense of it. She got up. She left her room and stood on the landing, looking upwards.