She died of scarlatina, soon after her second birthday, when I was five years old. I remember only fragments from the time before she died: Mama dancing Alma on her knee, and singing as she would never do again; reading my primer aloud to Mama while she rocked Alma’s cradle with her foot; walking beside Annie our nurse while she pushed the perambulator past the Foundling Hospital with me holding on to the frame. I remember coming home after one of those walks and being allowed to nurse Alma by the drawing-room fire, feeling the heat of the flames on my cheek as I held her. I remember too – though perhaps I was only told of it – lying in a cot and shivering, looking up at a window which seemed very small and far away, and hearing the sound of weeping, muffled as if through thick cotton wool. I do not know how long my own illness lasted, but it seems, in memory, as if I woke to find the house shrouded in darkness, and my mother changed beyond recognition. She kept to her room for many months, during which I was allowed only brief visits.
