Where was the fear? She searched herself as she listened: sometimes the rat-tat-tat of gunfire, rapid and snippy like the keys of two vast duelling type-writers battering out threats to each other on a paper sky.

When she entered the sitting room she was not at first noticed. The music had changed now, to something slower, and the women were dancing; Harri’s dark head against the breast of Gwen’s white shirt, Gwen’s hand low on Harri’s back. Gwen’s eyes were closed and the look on her face, serene and blissful, sent a fright through Clem.

He fingers her stuff, her undies, a stocking. He winds it round his hand, tight silk, unwinds it, lays it back across the chair where it dangles like leg skin.

Clem ground out her cigarette and immediately wished she hadn’t. It had felt like something live she could hold onto

The infant’s eyes were as black as if night were trapped behind his lids, and when he opened them she feared she’d be consumed.

Walking back in the lamp-stained dark, the duckboards greasy and glittering with frost, she wanted to sing, she wanted to scream, she wanted to make love to him, she wanted to die.

And then came Mrs Fletcher, snapping her scissors, the soft scrunch of the blades through thick hanks, the gradual sensation of lightness. Now every scrap of hair that Powell had touched was gone.

He frowned, pulled her roughly against him. She could feel the tickle of his chest hair against her cheek and his bristles on top of her head. She could feel the outraged beating of his heart.

The iris of his good eye was a curious pale grey, almost silver; the edges were darker, as if tarnished like a coin, and the artist made a brave attempt to paint the other eye to match. The eyebrow had been finely painted, with the most miniature of brushes, the most delicate of strokes, but it was a shade too yellow. The blank eye gazed beyond her.