The desk was cleared but for a single ivory-handled paper knife. All else was put away into a locked drawer. Mrs Dunlevy kept a notebook in the drawer in which she wrote most nights and some mornings. It was a mystery to Alice what she wrote in the notebook but it must be important or why would it be kept locked up like that?

‘They are not like us,’ Maeve Gorman had warned her five years ago, taking the fourteen-year-old Alice in hand during her first topsy-turvy weeks in the house. ‘Do not even try to understand their ways of being.’

These were wise words and Maeve, who had been in the Dunlevys’ house for three years as maid-of-all-work and then lady’s maid, had been full of wise words, or so they had seemed to Alice, who had been plucked from the world she knew and dropped into a foreign place where all was new and different and incomprehensible. And when Alice had wept for her home and her mother and her sister, Maeve had said, ‘This is your salvation, Alice Nimrod,’ sounding like Father McCreadie. Alice had thought she meant Jesus and the Holy Spirit and the Trinity and the Virgin Mother, but what Maeve had meant was you, Alice Nimrod, have been dragged out of the slum and shown another view of the world, you have been given a chance to have a better life. And when Maeve had given her notice and left to marry a man who sold gentlemen’s suits at Mark Foys department store and who wore nice clothes and had a bit of money, Alice understood. For Maeve had come from the same place she had, once. They had even lived in the same streets, though not at the same time.

‘My mum made hats,’ Alice had said, when she had found out. It was the first thing she had ever said about her mum, about her old life. And Maeve had nodded. Maeve had understood, though she had offered nothing in return.