‘I don’t know what I know about myself,’ Jacqueline says. ‘My children used to find me interesting when they were children. But then they got older, and they stopped. So I stopped thinking of myself that way. You try believing you’re worth a damn when every time you open your mouth they roll their eyes at you. They’d come home from school and bolt straight upstairs. I made them sit and eat their dinner with me, but they couldn’t wait to leave the table.’

‘I am very sorry to hear that. But, you know, this is very common behaviour for adolescents. You must not think it had anything to do with you.’

‘Is it common behaviour to abandon your elderly mother to a machine?’

‘Actually,’ says Patience, ‘it is.’

Although the university library is open at the weekend, Annika is not there, and neither are the seniors, which leaves Claire with little to do between Friday at five and Monday at nine. She takes a cruiser rather dutifully up the Spaarne, past narrow houses with tiled roofs, and an enormous brown windmill that looks like it has been constructed by giants out of plywood and Cook’s matches. She disembarks and walks around Park Schoteroog, looking at the pleasure boats out on the lake. There are none of the flax fields Mary Shelley noted in her letters, no bundles of river-soaked flax drying against the trees. Maybe that’s for the best: she’d complained about the stink.

Claire is passionately interested in Mary Shelley. It is not an informed passion, not exactly; there is something serendipitous and irrational in it. When she was sixteen, she bought Shelley’s second novel, Mathilda, from a cheap bookstall, and read it in a sort of daze, not understanding much of the prose, but feeling troubled by its effects. The long lost father, his incestuous love for his child, had a strange appeal; and certain phrases and passages lodged themselves in her memory and seemed to shine, like the notion that Happiness, not God, ‘sits enthroned above the clouds’, or Mathilda’s speech about prisons: ‘A little patience, and all will be over; aye, a very little patience; for, look, there is the key of our prison; we hold it in our own hands, and are we more debased than slaves to cast it away and give ourselves up to voluntary bondage?’ It had taken her a few more years to understand that the key Mathilda was talking about was the power to kill oneself.