Mrs O’Keefe moved to the oven, pulled out the shepherd’s pie she’d made earlier and placed it on the hot plate on the range, ready to transfer to the trivet in the middle of the kitchen table. ‘I have a plan,’ she said. ‘Don’t be worrying about the buses tonight – I’ve ordered a taxi to take the two of us and bring us back, so that gives you an extra half an hour. I’m coming with you. But first there’s a hot bath drawn and waiting for you upstairs. You go and get in it and soak your bones. You look frozen through.’

‘Oh God, thank you – and you’ve made food too. Can we take some back to the ward to try and tempt him to eat?’

‘We can. Now go, get in that hot bath before you catch your death.’

Mary Kate was desperate for the bathroom. The thought of a hot bath for her cold, aching body propelled her out of the door. She made for the stairs and didn’t see the expression on Mrs O’Keefe’s face.

‘William is with him,’ she threw over her shoulder on her way up. ‘He’s allowed to visit anytime, because he’s a doctor. It’s so mean – I’ve hated this having to come home in between the visiting times. I’m so glad Matron is moving him. You’d like her, Mrs O’Keefe – she reminds me of you. I don’t want to be wasting the money on a taxi though, who knows how long he’ll be like this? It could be that he can’t return to work for years, and the state he’s in, I can imagine it. He’s as yellow as the mustard and there isn’t a pick of fat on him.’

Mrs O’Keefe kept her tone neutral. ‘Go on, up,’ she said quickly. ‘We can talk about all of this later.’

Moments later, Mary Kate slipped into the hot water infused with Epsom salts, her clothes discarded on the bathroom floor and her velvet ribbon laid carefully on the glass shelf alongside. She let out a deep sigh and closed her eyes as she felt the hospital washing away and the warmth seeping into her bones.

*

Mrs O’Keefe was accompanying Mary Kate to the hospital that evening for a reason. She wanted to catch the eye of the ward sister or have a word with William, the other doctor at Nicholas’s practice, who she knew had been visiting Nicholas every day. She had suffered when her own husband had wasted away in the same manner in the same hospital. She knew what was coming and she couldn’t believe that no one had told Mary Kate that Nicholas was terminally ill. Someone would have to prepare her for the fact that he would never be coming home, and with not a single member of Mary Kate’s family even aware that Nicholas existed, it was going to have to be her.

The truth of Nicholas’s situation had finally come home to Mrs O’Keefe a couple of days earlier, when she’d happened to answer a phone call from Dr Gaskell. He’d been wanting to speak to Mary Kate but had sounded relieved to hear Mrs O’Keefe on the other end instead. His news, however, had been distressing.