‘Forgive us, my dear,’ the elder Miss Cave had pleaded on her death-bed, and Rose had pressed her hand and held back the tears. Her mother had been her greatest friend. She died at sixty-two when Rose was forty-one.

The cremation had been so quick, casual almost, like some medical thing, some slight ailment that must be, and is, efficiently put right. Afterwards she wept in the rented bungalow, looking around it and not ever wishing to live there again. The wretchedness that her birth had brought to her mother, the snootiness it had caused in her mother’s family, the difficulty it had placed on her in, a single woman with a child to account for: all that had drawn them close together. She had felt she wished to share the wretchedness, at least in some way to alleviate it. Rose Cave lived a selfless life until her forty-first year, until the day her mother died. And then, when she moved closer to London, closer to the work she did, she found it hard to feel that she was not alone. She joined clubs and societies to give herself something to do, but one night when she glanced around it seemed to her that she was just a little older than the other people present, and it seemed that the fact was noticeable.