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laid a concealing hand on his lap.
    ‘Irene,’ he said, ‘I wonder whether Pearl could go and play in some other room for a moment …’
    ‘Mr Harker –’ Irene began.
    ‘Just for a minute or two, while we get things sorted out.’
    Irene undid Pearl’s bib and told her to go and sit on the stairs.
    As soon as she’d gone, Harker said: ‘I’ve been meaning to talk to you for some time, Irene.’
    He said this with such gravity that Irene felt a slipperymovement in her heart, like a maggot in it. ‘If it’s about Pearl …’ she said.
    ‘Pearl?’
    ‘Yes. If it’s about me having to bring her to work, I know this is inconvenient for you, Mr Harker, but I can’t rightly do anything about it. There’s no one I can trust her with. No one at all. This is why I wrote the note. I know you don’t like having her here, disturbing you …’
    ‘Oh, it’s not exactly that …’ said Harker.
    ‘She’ll be in school springtime, when she’s four. Not long to go. And she’s a good girl. She does as I say. She plays with her dolls, but quietly. No singing …’
    ‘I’m sure.’
    ‘And if I were to have to leave … you know my circumstances, Sir. You know how hard it would be for me to –’
    ‘I’m sorry,’ said Harker firmly.
    ‘There’s no one else in Swaithey would give me work.’
    The choke in Irene’s voice, her flushed and agitated appearance, these seemed to Harker to expand her presence in the room, so that he felt he was going to be smothered. Tell her to go and so forth and do it now, Harker, he told himself. The state of his lap was appalling, perilous, even. His face burned with the shame of it and when he tried to speak, his mouth was dry.
    ‘I can’t discuss it,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry. As you know, I’m going to France in a fortnight’s time and I will pay you for the four weeks while I’m away and then that will have to be that.’
    Irene had not meant to cry. She apologised for herself. She got up and began to clear away the tea things. She let her tears flow onto the doily. She turned and looked at Mr Harker. She was surprised to find him still seated at the table. She thought he would have escaped back to his precious cellar by now.
    ‘Can I ask,’ she said through her film of misery, ‘if Pearl is the reason?’
    Harker blinked. He was distracted, as if his mind had already moved on somewhere else. ‘Pearl is the reason?’
    ‘Yes.’
    Oh yes. I’m afraid so,’ said Harker, marshalling his thoughts. ‘You see, my work is of a solitary kind, requiring great concentration. Any change of atmosphere in the house is damaging. Not your fault, Irene. Not your fault and I’m sorry. But there we are.’
    Still, he sat on at the table.
    It was most peculiar, Irene thought. He sat there stiffly, as though he were afraid to move.
    Irene wrung out the dishcloth and absent-mindedly wiped her face with it. It smelled of cabbage, of carbolic soap, of the wretchedness to come.
Livia’s Dictionary
    Mary floated in a new vision. The muddy edges of things had become distinct. Released by her new spectacles from a struggle of seeing, her mind found a new curiosity about what there was to understand. Miss McRae’s passion for Geography furnished her with words that seemed to come to her from far off: isthmus, glacier, fjord, delta, atoll. She did drawings of cloud formations and knew their names: cumulus meaning heap or pile, stratus meaning flat, cirrhus meaning a lock of curly hair. She learned that a stalactite was a mineral-filled icicle hanging from the roof of a cave and that drips from it built up beneath it and froze into a mound and then into a column, growing on and on upwards and called a stalagmite.
    Sometimes stalactites and stalagmites met. Then, it seemed to anyone entering the cave, that pillars had been built there to hold the roof up. ‘And this,’ said Miss McRae grandly, ‘is a quite extraordinary thing! Nature playing a marvellous wee game,