Could it be, then, that there was a point beyond which salvation was no longer a possibility, that a person could not be saved—or not saved in this world, at least? Alice could not believe such a thing, for it suggested an inevitability that seemed to deny God, and yet it seemed to her that Milli was at this point. Perhaps a man, some man with a position and a bit of money put by, would want to marry Milli and take on another man’s child …

But Alice had lived in too many damp, bug-infested rooms to believe in this fantasy. She had seen too many Mr Purleys. And the time when some man—any man—might want to marry Milli was gone.

Alice sat at Mrs Dunlevy’s desk. For a time she did not stir.

She thought what a fine thing it was to sit at a fine desk. She thought: Mrs Dunlevy goes to committees and sits on boards (though what a committee was and what it meant to sit on a board Alice had only the vaguest notion). She knew that one of those committees was the asylum at Pitt Street where the unmarried mothers went. Why then, she thought, should Mrs Dunlevy not wish to help an unmarried mother here, in her own home?

Alice knew she would not. She thought of Mrs Dunlevy, whose bathwater she drew, whose dirty linen she gathered up and disposed of, whose near-naked form she had helped to dress, whose frustrations and passions she occasionally witnessed, in the same way she might view a priest or the Governor-General’s wife, which was to say as someone who was not quite like other mortals, whose commands you followed unquestioningly and whose infallibility was absolute.

She stood up, dusting each place her fingers had touched, and returned to the window. Mrs Dunlevy had long disappeared from sight. Mrs Dunlevy went to committee meetings and she paid visits to other ladies and she went to her dressmaker. That was what she did. But that was not what she was doing this morning, Alice was certain, though she was not sure how she knew it.

She pulled off her cap and her apron and went down to the kitchen to Mrs Flynn. She prepared to tell a lie. ‘Mrs Flynn, the baker has left off half our order,’ Alice announced on entering the kitchen. ‘We are short two loaves. I cannot think how it happened but I shall go out now and fetch them myself.’ And she reached for her coat, pulling it on.

Mrs Flynn, whose domain the kitchen was, stopped dead in the act of rolling out her pastry and stared in astonishment at her. ‘They have never done such a thing before,’ she declared.