I shrink, in affection, to Janet’s size, and become Janet. The enormous yellow fire like a great eye; the window, enormous, through which anything can enter; a grey and ominous light which waits for the sun, a devil or an angel, which will shake away the rain. Then I make myself be Anna: I see Janet, a small child in a big bed. A train passes, and the walls shake slightly. I go over to kiss her, and smell the good smell of warm flesh, and hair, and the stuff of her pyjamas, heated by sleep. While her room warms I go into the kitchen and prepare her breakfast — cereal, fried eggs and tea, on a tray. I take the tray back into her room, and she eats her breakfast sitting up in bed, and I drink tea and smoke. The house is dead still — Molly will be asleep for another two or three hours. Tommy came in late with a girl: they’ll be asleep too. Through the wall, a baby is crying. It gives me a feeling of continuity, of rest, the baby crying, as Janet once cried. It is the contented half-sleepy cry of a baby who has been fed and will be asleep in a moment. Janet says: ‘Why don’t we have another baby?’ She says this often. And I say: ‘Because I haven’t got a husband and you must have a husband to get a baby.’ She asks this question partly because she would like me to have a baby; and partly to be reassured about the role of Michael. Then she asks: ‘Is Michael here?’ ‘Yes, he is, and he is asleep,’ I say firmly. My firmness reassures her; and she goes on with her breakfast. Now the room is warm, and she gets out of bed in her white sleeping suit, looking fragile and vulnerable. She puts her arms around my neck and swings on it, back and forth, singing: Rockabye baby. I swing her and sing — babying her, she has become the baby next door, the baby I won’t have. Then, abruptly, she lets me go, so that I feel myself spring up like a tree that has been bent over by a weight. She dresses herself, crooning, still half-drowsy, still peaceful. I think that she will retain the peace for years, until the pressure comes on her, and she must start thinking: in half and hour I must remember to cook the potatoes and then I must write a list for the grocer and then I must remember to change the collar on my dress and then … I want very much to protect her from the pressure, to postpone it; then I tell myself I must protect her from nothing, this need is really Anna wanting to protect Anna. She dresses slowly, chattering a little, humming; she has the lazy bumbling movements of a bee in the sun. She wears a short red pleated skirt and a dark blue jersey and long dark blue socks. A pretty little girl. Janet. Anna. The baby is asleep next door; there is the silence of content from the baby. Everyone asleep save me and Janet. It is a feeling of intimacy and exclusiveness — a feeling that began when she was born, when she and I were awake together at times when the city slept around us. It is a warm, lazy, intimate gaiety. She seems to me so fragile that I want to put out my hand to save her from a wrong step, or a careless movement; and at the same time so strong that she is immortal. I feel what I felt with sleeping Michael, a need to laugh out in triumph, because of this marvellous, precarious, immortal human being, in spite of the weight of death.