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madam.’ Next time he came her grandmother had prepared her. ‘You’re sickly, Evie,’ she told her, ‘remember that if asked, you’re sickly and can’t go out, you have to stay with me or you get took badly. It might work for a while and there’s nothing else will.’ It did work. The man stared at Evie, who must have looked as convincingly sickly as she tried to suggest because he said, ‘I see,’ to her grandmother and then, ‘The child needs a doctor.’ Mary said she had no money for doctors nor for the medicines they might prescribe. The man addressed Evie directly and asked her how often she went out, how well she ate, whether she slept well - but Evie had been well instructed by Mary and simply stared up at him in bewilderment with her mouth hanging open. He never came again.
    Life went on in the same way until one day Mary did not get up. Evie took her tea and toast and got on with what she always did, the household tasks by which she measured time. It was only when it grew dark and her grandmother was still in bed that things began to feel strange. She drew the curtains and lit the lamp and built up the fire but then, sitting alone with the mending, she felt awkward, she missed Mary in her chair talking to herself. She went to bed early, carrying out all the going-to-bed rituals of locking doors and dampening the fire and putting the guard round it to catch stray sparks and checking the wick of the lamp was turned low and the oil extinguished. But even lying on her mattress at the foot of her
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    grandmother’s bed didn’t seem right. Twice in the night she was wakened by the rattling of Mary’s breathing and twice she got up and went and peered at the old woman, but she was deeply asleep and did not respond to the timid touch on her cheek. The next morning Mary woke up but did not touch her tea and toast nor the soup offered later on, and Evie began to be frightened. She spent most of that day in the bedroom hovering by the bed, longing for some instructions and receiving none, not a word. She wanted somebody to come but nobody ever did. There were people next door, on both sides, and Evie knew their names but not their faces. Even the names seemed to change - ‘New folk,’ her grandmother occasionally said when somebody had come to their door and Evie had been told to keep herself hidden, ‘new folk again next door, I knew that last lot would never stay, but they’re nothing to do with us, Evie, eh? Potts they’re called, but that’s no concern of ours, we keep ourselves to ourselves and ask nothing of nobody, eh?’
    There was a smell on the third day that told Evie she must call on the Potts, or someone. She knew the smell of urine but this was worse, it came from her grandmother’s mouth and it was foul. Going downstairs, opening the curtains on to the grey dawn light, Evie found herself crying. She didn’t want to cry, she hadn’t intended to, but the tears rolled down her cheeks and would not stop. She stared out of the window but there was nothing to see, nobody going down the lane at that time of the morning. But she couldn’t tear herself away from the window, it offered some sort of hope. She stood motionless for half an hour, an hour, and when the first footsteps sounded on the sandstone flags she pulled the net curtain aside and peered out and tapped hard on the window-pane. A man passed by without so much as a glance but shortly after two women carrying big baskets heard her tapping and stopped and stared at her. But then, stupidly, Evie just stared back and did nothing and the women frowned and looked annoyed and went on their way. Still weeping, and trembling now, she at last left the window and stumbled to the door which she opened with difficulty, it was always so stiff, and then she stood in the doorway and waited, not knowing what she was going to say when someone asked her, as they surely would, what was the matter.
    The woman who did ask her was young and she was