She embraced me, and I could have been Catherine held in my own arms if Catherine had lived to become a squalling babe. There was nothing else to me but tears. Tears and wool, the wool of her cardiganed shoulder and her soft but nonetheless binding arms. I laid my head on her shoulder like a runaway child who lies down in the fold of the hill and makes a pillow of the turf. I cried for the scrap of my child who cried endlessly for me. The ratcheting cry of a hungry baby has nothing on the cry of a dead one sounding only in her mother’s ears. I cried louder than Catherine, I drowned her out, crying on the out-breath and on the in-breath, I don’t know how long for, I had no interest in knowing. The woman held firm until I went quiet, or relatively so, subsiding into a soft snuffling and sniveling, and beginning to feel a haunting, despairing thirst.

She led me to her kitchen, my eyes were swollen almost shut, and sat me down. She gave me a glass of water which I sucked down greedily, and a damp folded tea towel for my eyes.

“I heard her crying,” I said.

Even saying this, I felt the sweet tingling drain of my milk letting down. Surely that was impossible all these weeks later. But no: my brassiere was damp. For a moment my breasts hurt as much as they had done on the third day after she was born when they were so engorged, with no one to suckle.

I wished to lie in bed for ever, with wool blankets folding into hills all around me.

“Do you know what the doctor said, when my milk came in?” I said next. “He said, ‘You may feel a little down. It’s a common side effect of the beginning of lactation.’ Can you imagine.”

“Sadly I can. I would have given him a piece of my mind.”

I took the blindfold away. My swollen eyes had reduced a bit. She was sitting in front of me, empty hands resting on the table. She hadn’t put the kettle on or done anything extraneous. I thought, a most un-bustling woman. I didn’t want to raise my eyes to her face in case it set me off again, so I just looked at her hands, which were solid, tanned, with wrinkles around the knuckles and wide thumbnails each with a half-moon. Very capable and slightly damp from the rubber gloves. The gloves were tossed on the edge of the sink, half inside out. She must have hugged me in them and then taken them off.

“Thank you for letting me in. I hope your husband was right, and I’m not imposing . . .”

After that cyclone of crying, I was talking about imposing. Ridiculous.

“We know each other very well. He wouldn’t get something like that wrong.”