Chapter One

The sun was shining, and a small breeze was spicing along Piccadilly when Christine came out for her lunch.

She usually came out at midday, even when it was raining, instead of going up to the store canteen. You could never get a table to yourself, and whoever sat with you always wanted to talk grumbling shop about the customers or the management.

Everyone at Goldwyn’s seemed to have a grievance of some kind, although it was one of the best London stores to work for, and many of the men and women had been there for years and years – some of them long past retiring age - for the management was good to its old faithfuls and let them stay on even when they were really past it, like poor old Miss Mattee in Model Gowns, who was always trying to sell people lace dinner dresses that were much too old for them.

Christine herself had been in the book department for more than four years. She had started as a junior, knocking over piles of books and breaking the till about once a week in her efforts to serve customers briskly. Now she was head saleswoman and moved calmly about the alleys between the bright new paper jackets, knowing that book customers liked to take their time, unlike the thrusters who stampeded through the Haberdashery with never a moment to spare.

She knew every book in the place, and all about the new ones before they came out. She was said to be Mr Parker’s righthand man – and heaven knows he needed one – and was sometimes asked in to take coffee when a favoured publisher’s representative was in his office.

She liked her work, as much as one can like any job that imprisons one from nine until five-thirty. She liked Goldwyn’s, but she was always glad to get away from it at lunch-time, even though it meant queueing for a table at any of the restaurants and teashops that fed the West End workers, who ate with one eye on their watches and a partiality for things like macaroni and suet pudding which were the most filling for the least cost.

She was wearing her grey flannel suit today. She thought it made her waist look trim, although it made her stick out farther in front than she cared for. A generation ago she would have been admired as buxom. Now she was a little too plump, and streamlined salesgirls tutted at her in fitting-rooms when they could not close the zipper of a dress that was the right size for her height.

She was thirty-four. She had silky brown hair that would not stay set unless she pinned it up every night, and a full creamy face with a smile that seemed to have been carved on to it from birth.

She was often teased about being too plump, and because her face reposed in a smile even when she was not smiling inside, she was supposed not to mind the teasing.

Sometimes, when life seemed hardly worth going on with, as it does to women when they are tired, she saw herself as a figure of tragedy, like those pictures of veiled French widows walking behind their husbands’ coffins at important funerals; but her face could never look the part, and people still thought of her as Good Old Christine. Always cheerful and good-tempered. Quite a tonic.

Christine liked the grey flannel suit because it gave her a good waist. She had been liking it for a long time, because she had accepted her aunt’s advice that it was better to buy an expensive suit that would last than to keep buying trumpery-smart cheap suits that looked very dashing for the first few weeks, until they began to wrinkle at the elbows and sag at the seat. The good grey flannel had been what the tailor called a Classic, which meant that nobody would even turn round in the street to look at it, but it would stand having its skirt taken up or let down according to the swings of fashion. It was up at the moment, because the ‘New Look’ was already old, and women were no longer walking bell tents.

The book department, partly due to Mr Parker’s laissez-faire administration and partly because it was cultural, which put the assistants on a closer level to the customers, was the only department in Goldwyn’s where you did not have to wear black. With so many women going shopping without hats, this led to some confusion as to who was an assistant and who was a customer, but that occurs in all book shops, and accounts for the distressed look of people who have picked up a book they want and are afraid they are going to have their elbows grasped by the store detective before they can find someone to take their money.

With the suit, Christine wore a grey felt beret which had been sold to her cheaply by Mrs Arnold in Millinery, because it had a mark on the back and no customer would buy it. Women were absurdly fussy when they had money to spend. When they were walking along Piccadilly they were just ordinary women, quite meek, and obeying the policeman at the St James’s Street crossing; but as soon as Goldwyn’s commissionaire, who bought his medals at the Surplus Supply stores in the Strand, had pushed open the swing doors for them, they became customers, and that made them arrogant.

Christine had easily removed the mark on the hat with some lighter fluid. Any woman could have done the same; but to have noticed the mark with a shrewd mouth, to have refused to buy the polluted hat made them feel recherché. They knew what was what. They demanded the best, and so they bought a hat which did not suit them nearly so well, were borne down one floor in the lift when they easily could have walked, and sailed out of the shop in a glory of ego, thinking that the false smile of Mrs Arnold, who was in charge of Millinery, meant: There goes a lady who knows what she wants.

So Christine had got the hat and was glad. She always felt safe when she wore this suit and hat. Unexciting, but correct. Even when she hazarded the supreme test of catching herself sideways in shop windows, she looked all right. It would not matter whom she met, as it would if she were wearing the green coat with the collar like a run-over cat, which her aunt said was quite good enough to go to work in and need not be given to the nuns until next year.

Not that she ever did meet anyone in her lunch-hour. Alice, who was her junior, was always meeting people and having small adventures at lunch-time. Even if it was only a man who had picked up her glove in the cafeteria, she made it sound exciting, like an adventure. Alice and the other junior, Helen, were always giggling in the classics section where customers did not go so much. If Christine came along they would stop giggling and pretend to be straightening books. Christine thought this should have made her feel very old, but it didn’t. She was much happier now than she had been at the giggling age. She liked her authority in the book department. Sometimes, outside, she insecurely did not know how she stood in relation to the rest of the world. At Goldwyn’s she was someone.

Crossing Piccadilly and going through the narrows of Half Moon Street, sinister with bachelors’ chambers and the brass plates of Indian doctors, she was nobody except a short plump girl who looked younger than her years, walking across Curzon Street and up Audley Street to have Welsh rarebit in an Oxford Street snackbar. She did not want adventure. She wanted just to walk in the sun and get the scent of hyacinths that someone had planted in the window-box of a little white house on the corner of South Street.

A young woman in a camel-hair coat passed her pushing two small children in a pram. Christine appraised them with interest to determine whether or not they were twins. She wondered, as she often did, what it would be like not to go to work, but to be married and not have to leave your house all day unless you had to take the children out or do some shopping.

When she looked into the future Christine was a little troubled about not being married, but ordinarily she did not worry very much about it. Her friends did that for her, even the ones who were not happily married themselves and secretly envied her independence. She would like to be married, but not as much as her friends thought when they introduced her to loveless bachelors.

Her aunt, who liked to have Christine at home, said that there was plenty of time and the right man would come along soon enough, but as he had waited thirty-four years to do it Christine was beginning to wonder whether he ever would. She had her dream man, of course, with whom she stood at the altar sometimes when she was in bed at night and fancied she was prettier than she was. She knew the way he looked and the things he said. She would recognize him immediately if he came along, and then her life would start to be quite different.

In Grosvenor Square the trees were hazed with curly bright young leaves. The grass was impeccable and knew no foot, and tulips like red and white United States Dragoons were drawn up round the base of the Roosevelt statue.

People looked happier today. The women did not look as if their feet hurt, and here and there someone raised a smiling face to the sun, which had the first real warmth of the year. In the square there were girls with magazines and books and cakes in paper bags, as well as the old men who sat there hopelessly, whatever the weather. The old men did not look at the girls, but the girls sat at the far end of the benches and drew their skirts close.

There were only one or two old men colonizing in the Little America that Grosvenor Square had become since the war. Stately families had long since abandoned the tall houses that once broke the hearts and backs of servants, and nearly every door carried the plate of some Government department. Besides the flag-flaunting Embassy, there were American offices on all four sides of the square. Roosevelt was in his right place in the middle of it all. He stood alone, as he never could in life, cloaked and immortal, and English people were surprised that some of the Americans they met did not think him as great as they did. When an Englishman meets a Republican he is as surprised about Roosevelt as an American is when he meets a Socialist who criticises Churchill.

Christine walked to the north end of the square and saw that clouds were encroaching on the pale spring blue overhead. After lunch the sun might have gone in, so she decided to sit for a moment in its warmth and think about what she could possibly do with the neckline of the dress she would have to wear at the dance tonight. The green was at the cleaners and the black had torn away at the zipper last time she tried to step out of it instead of pulling it over her head. She and her aunt had been saying for days that they would mend it.

So it would have to be the spangled blue, which did something funny at the collar. It would be all right if she could wear an orchid or a rose to cover the fault, but Geoffrey did not bring you flowers – he thought it was honour enough to go out with him – and although Christine could have afforded a corsage, it would have made her feel pathetic to have to buy it for herself.

She did not feel pathetic as she sat on a bench and widened her smile to the sun. She could not worry about the dress. It was not worth it, for although Geoffrey liked to talk as though he was a connoisseur of women, he never noticed what you wore.

Two American women in red and yellow duster coats and hats like jockey caps were photographing each other against the Roosevelt statue. Three others, fur-coated and expensive, walked down to the Dorchester for lunch. Expatriates, sated with the incomprehensible sleeping age of the Tower and Westminster Abbey, they came here to reassure themselves with the knowledge that this American garden was the cleanest square in London, and to recharge their vitality with the sight of the monstrous shining beetles parked all round, which dwarfed the few English cars among them into insufficiency.

They also liked to see the uniforms. You could not see English uniforms unless you went to the Trooping of the Colour, or were lucky enough to be in the Mall when the faceless Lifeguards jogged by with scarlet cloaks and burning helmets, their black horses catching at the jingle of their bits as if they knew that so splendid a sight must be accompanied by music. But in Grosvenor Square the American officers came out of the naval headquarters on the corner of North Audley Street all glamorous in dark blue and gold, with chestfuls of rainbow ribbons that did not necessarily mean a hero.

One of them walked past Christine. She narrowed her eyes to see whether, by blurring her focus, she could make him look like an Englishman. Coming towards her he could have been, but going away no Englishman could have owned that small round bottom, each side rising independently as though moved by wires from his shoulders. It was the walk that became so familiar during the war, when G.I.s in short battle-jackets proclaimed by the tilt of their bottoms that they had come over to pull England’s chestnuts out of the fire once more.

The two girls in jockey caps finished their roll of film and moved away laughing, because one of them would send the pictures to her father and he would ask visitors: ‘Did you know my Eileen was once photographed with F.D.R.?’ and then scatter their astonishment by showing them the picture of the girl and the statue.

A robin hopped on the grass like a marionette. Christine thought about the Welsh rarebit she was going to seek as soon as the sun reached that waiting cloud, and the American naval officer, who was evidently out for his health, completed his tour of the square and sat down at the end of her bench, breathing deeply through his nose.

‘Would you care for a cigarette?’ He had taken one out for himself, and before he lit it he held the packet towards her. If he had been in America he would have slid nearer to her along the bench, but as he was in England he kept his distance. English girls were always either suspecting you of evil designs or being frustrated because you did not have them. It did not occur to him that in Grosvenor Square she might be an American girl. Perhaps it was her shoes.

‘No, thank you. Very much. I don’t smoke,’ Christine added, to show she was not snubbing him.

He did not notice anything about her except the creamy skin, which English girls got free and American women spent hundreds of dollars vainly seeking.

‘Nice day,’ he said, nodding conclusively at Grosvenor Square.

‘Isn’t it?’ she answered, thinking, as she always did when she talked to Americans, that her voice sounded mincing.

She noticed about him that he had black, rather saturnine eyebrows that needed combing, and a mouth like James Stewart’s that looked as if it might be going to blow a little bubble.

The sun went behind the cloud. Christine stood up, thinking of food. Had they talked enough for her to say Good-bye?

He solved that for her by throwing away his match and saying: ‘Good-bye’, giving it an extra little sing-song syllable that sounded like a secret smile.

Walking towards Oxford Street, Christine thought: Now Alice would make an adventure out of that. Then she wondered whether that big cameo brooch would do anything for the neck of the blue evening dress, and then she thought: But then if I’d been Alice I’d probably be having lunch with him by now. In the snackbar, opening her book and putting her knife into the still bubbling Welsh rarebit, she was glad that she was not.

Half-past five took a long time to arrive. Some days it was upon you almost before you had time to turn round. On other days, when you were not so busy, it was a point in eternity, certain as death, but just as remote. In the middle of the afternoon Christine brought out a pile of books that were not selling, and told Miss Burman and Mrs Drew and Alice and Helen to push them on to anyone who vaguely wanted just ‘a novel’.

Mr Parker had made a mistake about these books. He had bought too many of them, against Christine’s advice, and when he found they were not selling he had said to her peevishly: ‘What’s the matter with all you people? You’re letting that Black Monkey book hang about too long. You know what I always say – keep the stock rolling. Keep it moving. Make way for the new stuff.’ He picked up pens and moved things about on his desk, as if he were playing draughts.

‘We’d have sold it out,’ Christine had said, ‘if you hadn’t ordered too many copies. I told you not to, but you had to know better.’

Because he was rather old and rather foolish, she often spoke to him as if he were an aged parent or a troublesome child. He did not mind. He had a daughter at home who spoke to him in the same way, and sometimes he thought he liked Christine better than the daughter, because although she bullied him she backed him up when he had committed himself and tried to put right his errors.

Both women often said to him: ‘I told you so.’ The daughter would leave him to stew in his own mistakes, but Christine worked to help him out of them. So this afternoon she brought a pile of Black Monkey novels out of the storeroom, blew a little dust off them, arranged them at the front of one of the fiction counters and told her assistants to sell them.

The reading public would be surprised to know how often it is sold books it does not want. Because it is allowed to wander round a book department, picking up and putting down and not being bothered unless it asks for help, it thinks it is not subject to the more obvious salesmanship of the other departments. But it is. A good bookseller can get rid of almost any book he has overbought, and Christine was a good bookseller.

By the end of the day she and Miss Burman between them had sold more than a dozen copies of Black Monkey. Miss Burman was also an old hand, well known to regular customers, who liked to call her by name, and responded, when she said: ‘Now this is a book that you could appreciate, madam’, like lambs to the slaughter.

Beginning to tidy up at five o’clock, Christine heard Helen say to a dithering customer with a neckful of martens: ‘Oh, you would, madam. Everybody’s reading it. In fact, we’ve just had to reorder.’

Alice, tossing her pageboy bob around the place, did not sell any copies of Black Monkey. She did not try to. Alice was self-engrossed and unco-operative. She would not last long in the book department, but would soon find herself in Art Jewellery, where she would be much more at home.

Going into Mr Parker’s office with the special autographed copies of A Golden Journey to the East, which he insisted on locking in his safe at night, although it is doubtful whether they would have interested a burglar, Christine said: ‘That Helen. She’s coming along nicely. I think she’ll be quite valuable to us soon.’

‘She’s awfully spotty,’ grumbled Mr Parker.

‘It’s her age. So was I when I was nineteen.’

‘Were you?’ Mr Parker peered at her through the top half of his bi-focals. ‘Come to think of it, so was I. I hated being nineteen.’

Christine tried to picture him with all his hair, and a gawky body with red wrists dangling out of his coat sleeves. He was so hunched now into the acceptance of old age, slow and precise and sparing of his waning vitality, that it was hard to believe his juices had ever run copiously enough to force an overflow in pimples.

‘Well, we got Black Monkey moving for you,’ she said. ‘It might be almost cleared by the end of the week.’

‘I told you it would,’ he said, taking the leather-bound books from her and stooping to fiddle with the combination of his safe. ‘I told you it would sell.’

‘You told me to sell it, you mean. Here, let me.’ Although he never changed the combination of his safe, he sometimes had difficulty in finding it. She opened the door and put in the books. There was no money in there, because the takings were delivered to the chief cashier every day, but there was a mess of papers, a bottle of cheap brandy, and a tumbler.

‘In the war,’ Christine said, ‘when I was a nurse, we used to drink the brandy from the medicine cupboard on night duty and fill the bottle up with water, but I don’t see why you want to lock up the glass as well.’

‘So I can be sure of finding it,’ Mr Parker said.

Outside the office, Helen came up to Christine flat-footed, pushing at her spectacles.

‘I don’t know what to do, Miss Cope,’ she said earnestly. ‘That man over there has been reading the Lives of the Saints for nearly half an hour and he doesn’t look as if he’d ever stop.’ She looked at her watch, which was a man’s watch with an aluminium case and a telescopic band. She did not trust the store clocks, although they were synchronized to Greenwich time.

‘Tell him we’re closing in five minutes,’ Christine said. ‘He should have read enough of the saints by now to avoid having to buy the book.’

‘But, Miss Cope, you always tell me not to disturb customers when they’re looking at books.’

‘Oh, don’t be so literal. Get rid of him.’ Christine turned away, irritated by Helen’s smugness and the way she drew down her mouth at the corners when she was worried.

Helen gave her a hurt look and went towards the customer, massaging her stubby hands, and Christine thought: Oh well, perhaps she’s like that because she’s plain and has no eyebrows or eyelashes and thinks she’ll have to make a success as a career woman, if nothing else.

Actually, however, Helen had a passionate, perspiring young man who thought she was quite beautiful and was going to marry her when he had finished his military training. She did not tell anyone about him in case they asked his name. He was called Steuart Begwater, and it embarrassed her to say this.

At five-thirty the juniors put on the dustcovers, Alice in haste, because she had a date with the new young man in Cooked Foods, Helen sedulous as a priest. They all collected their handbags from the shelf under the humorous books. Miss Burman took out the bag of lemon tarts which she had bought in the bakery to take home to her mother, who could not get her teeth into anything except Goldwyn’s pastry, and looked anxiously in her pot-bellied handbag to see that she had got the receipt.

If you bought anything in the store you had to show the receipt for it as you went past the timekeeper at the staff door, to prove you had not stolen it. This practice had been instituted during the war when all kinds of assistants who were not really Goldwyn’s type had to be taken on. It was a source of great effrontery to the old-timers, especially when it was rumoured through the store one day that Mrs Darby in Toys had actually had her handbag searched.

Mr Parker tracked out of his office wearing his overcoat and the turned-down black hat that made him look as if he were the violinist from a German band. The other department managers usually left before closing time, but Mr Parker never did. As it was a trial to him to go down the stairs to the basement and up again to the staff door, the commissionaire kept one of the revolving doors open for him.

‘Good night all,’ he said vaguely.’ Have a nice weekend.’ On his doctor’s orders, he did not come in on Saturday mornings. He did not see how they could possibly manage without him, but they did.

‘You look after that cough now,’ said Miss Burman, who, from years of mothering her mother, had the instinct to mother Mr Parker too.

Christine went down to the cloakroom with Mrs Drew, who was her friend. Margaret Drew was nice-looking the second or third time you saw her, although at first you did not notice it. She was always strictly neat. Her short black hair was like a glossy elf’s cap, her nose never shone, even on a summer working day, and if she broke a shoulder strap she sewed it at once, instead of keeping it pinned for days. She worked in the book department because her husband did not earn enough to keep them both and keep their son at a preparatory school. She hated Goldwyn’s and often said so.

She said so tonight as she and Christine walked together to Green Park station. The warmth of the day had gone down in a thin green sunset and people were hurrying, pressing along in a crowd, unconscious of each other, because there was always a crowd every night and they were thinking only of getting home.

‘I’m fed up,’ Margaret said, as they waited to cross Piccadilly. ‘I’m fed with customers who can’t make up their minds. I’m fed with old Parker, I’m fed with poor old Burman calling me dear and wanting to have lunch with me, and I’m fed with the idea of going home and cooking liver and bacon for Laurie’s supper.

‘I’m also fed,’ she said, as the traffic stopped and they moved off the pavement like sheep in a flock, ‘with seeing disgusting unmade beds when I get home, and having to make them.’

‘Why don’t you make them before you come out?’

‘Haven’t got time. Laurie always wants a hot breakfast, and he insists on me sitting with him while he eats it, and pouring his coffee and buttering his toast, as if I were a leisured wife in a flowered housecoat with nothing to do all day but my nails. He doesn’t like me working, and so he clings to these last vestiges of a civilized marriage.’

Christine was surprised. She had been to Margaret’s home many times, and admired her husband’s constant need of her. He did not even want to go to the corner for cigarettes unless she came too, and at a party he always spent some of the time talking to her, unlike most husbands, who treated their wives as total strangers from a party’s beginning to its end. But was being loved then such a bore?

She imagined how it would feel to be going home to a husband instead of to an aunt and a father. You would look forward to getting home, surely. But then Christine did not know the husband she was imagining, which made him exciting. Margaret had known Laurie for twelve years, and Christine had seen her sometimes quite unaware if he touched her.

Christine lived with her father and her Aunt Josephine in an ugly red house, redeemed by ivy, that stood on the edge of Barnes Common. The house had once been a rectory, and looked it. The downstairs rooms were high and large, and upstairs there were a lot of odd – shaped rooms which had once been nurseries for the families of prolific rectors.

It had been cold then with a holy chill, and it was cold now, except in the bathroom, which housed a boiler and a monstrous hot cupboard and was too hot to support life for long.

Christine did not like living in Barnes, which was neither in London nor out of it. She hated the never – ending bus ride down Castelnau, where the once grand houses nursed their shame of conversion into private hotels and apartments. But her father liked to be able to walk out of his front door on to the common and swing his stick among the disheartened gorse bushes. In summer, when he could not walk without stumbling over writhing couples, he would write wordy letters to the local paper, insisting that the common be cleaned up.

People coming to the house for the first time, travel – weary after the long, hopeless ride from Hammersmith Bridge, would say brightly: ‘Why, it’s just like the country!’ But they did not mean it.

Christine’s mother had died in this house when Christine was fourteen. The night after the funeral Christine took ten shillings from her father’s dressing – table while he slept and ran away to Eastbourne, to the landlady of a small hotel where she and her brother had spent several holidays when they were little. The landlady gave her a breakfast of cornflakes and two boiled eggs, bought her ticket back to London and sent her home. Aunt Josephine, who was now in charge of the house on Barnes Common, gave her another breakfast, and nobody scolded her except her brother, who would have liked to go to Eastbourne too.

Christine got off the bus and walked down the sandy side – road to her home. The house was called ‘Roselawn’, but Aunt Josephine had let Christine’s mother’s roses go to ruin because she had not time for them, and the lawn, recovered from the scars of Christine and Roger’s cricket pitch, had now succumbed again to Roger’s children, who came there at weekends to play.

In the middle of the lawn was a small enclosure, crudely made from wire-netting bent round sticks pushed askew into the ground, and covered with a piece of sacking. Christine lifted a corner of the sacking. A round-headed, black-and-white puppy stood up clawing at the netting and bumped her face wetly.

Neither the puppy nor the wire-netting had been there when Christine left for work that morning. She shook her head and smiled as she replaced the cover. The puppy squeaked and bounced up and made bulges in the sacking, but it was too little to get out.

Christine did not go into the house by the front door, because she had lost her key. Her father said the police should be notified. He believed, like many people of his age who were not brought up from scratch on the engineering marvel of the Yale key, that anyone finding it would easily discover which front door it fitted. Even if they had, Christine did not think there was anything in the house worth stealing. If a burglar had come after the unwieldy old silver or the incomplete sets of china in the cabinet, he would not get past her father’s cantankerous alsatian, who hurled himself against the front door at the meekest knock, and had been terrorizing postmen for years.

So Mr Cope went on saying that the police should be notified, and the key went on being lost, and nobody did anything about telling the police or getting a new key cut.

Christine went in by the back door, past the dustbins and the coalshed, whose door had long ago been burst by an overflow of coke, and the bucket of garbage that Aunt Josephine put out for the man who kept chickens. The man did not really need the garbage, although Aunt Josephine insisted that she should help him, so he did not collect it too regularly, and the bucket smelled.

With eggs so scarce in the shops, Christine’s father and aunt were always saying that they should keep chickens themselves. Eggs had been scarce since early in the war, so as it was now 1950 they had been saying it for ten years.

Aunt Josephine was in the kitchen, cooking supper and writing letters at the same time. She wrote hundreds of letters to her relations on thin paper, with the writing criss-crossed on the back. The Cope family was large and scattered all over the globe, and Aunt Josephine made it larger by discovering second cousins in New South Wales and step-grandchildren of Copes who had long ago emigrated to Canada and lost touch with family and home.

Aunt Josephine kept them in touch with unexciting news of who had married whom, and titbits about the royal family, and tidings of the death of people they had never known existed. She was a great one, too, for graves. She kept a little notebook with the place and date of burial of anyone remotely connected with the family, and, if geographically possible, would stumble there at the anniversary on her large turned-over feet to lay some flowers on the grave and scold the cemetery gardener for neglecting it.

Once, a long time ago, when she had taken a trip to India to see her sister, she had discovered that a very distant cousin had been buried at sea in the Indian Ocean. She took a wreath on the ship with her, made the captain tell her when they reached the exact longitude and latitude, and cast the now withered wreath upon the sea, to the edification of passengers and crew.

While she wrote at the kitchen table with her feet twisted round the legs, she had an alarm clock standing by the stove. It shrilled as Christine came in. Aunt Josephine cried: ‘My pie!’ and hurried to the oven, knocking papers off the table and smudging her forehead with ink as she pushed back her hair, which was like a thick, flecked off-white wool that she was still knitting into seaboot socks, because she did not see why merchant seamen should be neglected just because the war was over.

She was a tall, ungainly woman, who moved with bent knees and elbows stuck out. Her gestures were large and uncontrolled. She was always knocking things off mantelpieces and catching her heel in lamp flexes. She and the alsatian, who swished his muscular tail among the lower furniture, caused quite a lot of havoc in the house, which was one reason why there was nothing much left to burgle.

‘Not done!’ cried Aunt Josephine in disgust, pulling the pie out and pushing it in again with a shove that nearly sent it through the back of the oven. ‘I can’t understand it. I set the clock so carefully, but things are always either raw or burnt.’

‘It would be easier if you watched them, really.’ Christine took off her beret and shook out her short hair. ‘The gas pressure’s always going up and down these days, so you never know.’

‘It’s the Government,’ said Aunt Josephine bitterly. ‘Well, they needn’t think I’m going to hang over my stove just to please a lot of Socialists. I’ve got far better things to do.’ She reset the alarm clock and went back to her letters, treading on one of the cats, which screeched and ran under the stove.

Another cat, a smug tortoiseshell, crooned on the window-sill among Aunt Josephine’s plants and pots of chives and parsley. Two love-birds heckled each other in a cage on the wall, goldfish swam idly in a glass bowl on top of the refrigerator, and a very old snuffling fox-terrier slept on a blanket by the stove. Some cheese rinds and half a bun lay near his nose, but he either did not know they were there or could not be bothered to eat them.

Christine’s own dog, which had watched for her in the road and come in with her, snatched up the cheese and the bun, rolling his eye at the fox-terrier, which would snap at him if it woke. He was a mongrel, a formless, brown-and-white wriggler, who was more like a long-legged spaniel than anything else. Sometimes you thought he would have looked better if his tail had been cut at birth. Sometimes you thought that would have made him look worse. He loved Christine with spaniel eyes all the time, and loved Aunt Josephine with drooling jaws at mealtimes.

Aunt Josephine often grumbled and muttered about having to feed and look after all these animals, but it was she who was responsible for the presence of the cats and the birds and the goldfish and the fox-terrier, and she who had bought the mongrel for Christine when he looked at her through the bars on one of her roving visits to the Battersea Dogs’ Home.

The alsatian was not her doing. She fed it, and let it in and out every time it wanted to go and rave in the garden at innocent passers-by, but she did not like it, because its selfish, belligerent nature reminded her of her sister’s husband, who had finally drunk himself off the map in Australia. It was her brother’s dog. Ever since he came to this house he had always had an alsatian as a protection against the wild barbarism of Barnes Common.

‘Well, I see you got another child,’ Christine said. ‘What’s that out there on the lawn?’

‘My goodness, I forgot all about her.’ Aunt Josephine ran her long tongue over an envelope flap and banged it down with her fist. ‘The poor little thing will die of cold. Run out and get her, there’s a dear. I haven’t got my shoes on.’

She was wearing the black leather slippers, like coffins, which she always put on as soon as she came into the house. Since she had to clean the floors, she saw no sense in bringing dirt in from outside for herself to sweep up and take out again.

She was illogical in her care of the house. She was particular about the floors. She could not bear to see dirt on them, and yet the furniture was covered with dogs’ hairs, the mirror in the hall gave you a foggy reflection, and the telephone was thick with dust and so clogged with raw pastry from times when she had left her cooking to answer it, that you could hardly dial a number. At week-ends Christine was sometimes stirred to do some cleaning, but she got no thanks from Aunt Josephine, who liked to be the sole motive power of the house, with everybody else as passengers.

‘It’s a sweet little thing,’ Christine said as she came in with the puppy, slapping down her own dog, which was trying to jump up and smell the newcomer, ‘but do we really need another dog?’

‘It wouldn’t hurt,’ her aunt said, ‘but it isn’t ours, so don’t get excited. The Grahams have gone away for the weekend, so I said I’d look after it for them.’

‘You said you’d look after the Fishers’ cat over Christmas,’ Christine said. ‘That was four months ago, and it’s still here.’

‘I forgot, I can’t think how. And by the time I remembered, it didn’t want to go. You can’t blame it. The Fishers don’t know how to look after animals. They expected it to live off the mice it caught.’

‘If you didn’t feed ours so much they might catch some mice. There’s one in my bedroom cupboard.’

‘Well, you shouldn’t keep biscuits in there.’ Aunt Josephine made some flourishes over the paper and started another letter.

‘I get hungry.’ The alarm shrilled, Christine’s dog barked and the puppy wriggled out of her arms and plopped on the floor. The dog and one of the cats chased it into a corner, where it stood at bay while introductions were performed.

Christine stopped the alarm, looked at the pie and turned off the oven. ‘You only have pie when I’m going out,’ she complained.

‘Oh dear, are you going out?’ Aunt Josephine looked up, her thick eyebrows drawn together in disappointment. ‘I thought we’d finish that hand of Canasta. I kept the cards on the table. Bruce knocked them off with his tail, but I put them back again.’

‘With all the wild cards in your hand.’

‘Naturally. And I’d planned a nice dinner for you, because I thought you’d be tired. The sales,’ said Aunt Josephine vaguely, beginning to write again. ‘I know what it is.’

‘The sales were two months ago,’ Christine said. ‘You live in a world of your own. I’m sorry, but I told you I was going out. To that dance with Geoffrey.’

‘Dreadful creature,’ said her aunt. ‘He has no sex.’

‘That makes no odds. He’s my cousin. Oh dear,’ she said dutifully, as Aunt Josephine raised her head and made her face look stricken. ‘I’m sorry. Have I hurt you?’

Aunt Josephine was supposed to have been engaged to a first cousin forty years ago. The cousin had spurned her and married a girl with money, and this was Aunt Josephine’s ‘tragedy’, sacred in family history, a thing to be respected; not unmentionable, because however great her distress and shame at the time, she was now proud of it. Her blighted love was one of her treasured possessions, like her amber beads and the family Bible which her father had entrusted to her instead of to her brother. You could refer to it, but you could not speak of it lightly.

‘I’m sorry,’ Christine said. ‘It was different with you, of course.’

‘Yes.’ Aunt Josephine fetched up a sigh. ‘It was different with me.’

‘Well, anyway -’ Christine changed the subject before her aunt could start off about: I remember the dress I wore that night he told me… ‘Well, anyway, I’m discouraged about what to wear. Did you by any chance mend the zipper of the black velvet?’

Aunt Josephine clapped her hand to the side of her head with a sound like wood-chopping.’ My darling, I forgot! How could I have forgotten?’

She was always forgetting things. Names, telephone numbers, engagements slipped through her mind like water. If you particularly wanted her to do something, you had to write it down on the pad that hung in the kitchen, called ‘The Housewife’s I MUST’, but she forgot to look at the pad.

Christine and her father were used to her bad memory, but Aunt Josephine herself was constantly surprised by it, although she had been forgetting things for as long as Christine could remember.

‘I’ll have to wear the blue then,’ Christine said, ‘and I look like a milk-churn in it. Not that it matters with Geoffrey. He’s too busy thinking about what he looks like in his midnight-blue dinner jacket.’

‘Then why worry?’ said Aunt Josephine comfortably.

‘Oh, but then, you know -’ Christine turned her head away. ‘Other people see you, and one ought always to …’

Like any unmarried girl - and some married women-she was never without the idea, at the start of any party, that this time, tonight, she might meet someone who …

Party after party went by, but she never did. Sometimes she thought she had, but they always turned out wrong.

But the ritual of bathing and dressing and grooming yourself for a party excited you all over again to the possibility of someone who…

She fiddled about for a long time with the neck of the blue dress, pinning it this way and that, trying the cameo brooch in different places until the draped collar was marked by pin-holes and a smudge of lipstick from her little finger.

The front-door bell rang while she was still fiddling, and the alsatian rushed through the hall with his booming bark, his nails rattling on the polished boards. Christine was getting desperate about the dress, beginning to think that she would have to make some excuse to Geoffrey and tell him she could not go. The bell rang again. Geoffrey was always punctual. He was a stockbroker, successful, according to his views, and he attributed his success to things like being punctual and knowing head waiters at the right places, instead of to the fact that he had inherited a ready-made job in his family firm.

The bell rang a third time, the alsatian nearly went mad, and Christine’s father called out: ‘Front door!’ although he was in the drawing-room, only a few yards away from it.

‘Let him go,’ said Aunt Josephine, coming into Christine’s room. ‘He behaves as if he had a staff of servants. Why, my dear, how beautiful you look.’ She loved Christine and was as biased about her appearance as if she were her own daughter.

‘Oh, I don’t,’ wailed Christine. ‘This dress looks awful. The neck has always been wrong, only I hadn’t the guts to walk out of the shop after trying on so many.’

‘Let me lend you my spray of roses. You could catch it up underneath them and it would look all right.’

‘Oh, I can’t. I mean – artificial flowers – well, I know they’re awfully pretty, but I –’

Aunt Josephine went away to get them. She liked artificial flowers, and the fact that young people thought you could not wear them did not shake her. She came back and held the floppy red silk roses against the neck of the blue dress.

Christine wriggled and then stood still, surprised to find that the roses did not look at all bad. They looked obviously unreal, which was their saving grace. The taboos of girl friends and odd quirks of prejudice culled through the years died hard. You could wear Woolworth pearls and get away with it, but you could not wear artificial flowers. Or could you?

‘I’ll wear them,’ she declared. ‘I think they look all right.’

With her tongue between her teeth she pinned them on. Aunt Josephine went away sighing, because she had offered a favour by lending the roses, but Christine seemed to be doing her a favour by accepting them.

Geoffrey was in the drawing-room with Mr Cope when they went down. Aunt Josephine was carrying the puppy, to protect it from the other animals. It nuzzled against the flat woollen bosom of her dress and licked the red V of her skin.

Geoffrey was sitting in an armchair by the fire with his fingers laced and one leg swung loosely over the other. He was a tall, thin, sandy-haired man with obtrusive glasses and a little hedge of moustache over his pink upper lip, which hung slightly over the lower one. His hands were long and dainty and his evening shoes sharply pointed. He was not effeminate, yet he was as unmasculine as it is possible to be without being a woman.

He stood up when the two women came in and said: ‘Greetings’, to Christine, and: ‘I hope I see you well’, to Aunt Josephine.

Christine’s father was standing before the fire with his hands in his pockets and his trousers stretched tightly over his fat little stomach. He was a short, irritated-looking man with a pushed-out lower lip and dark shadows round his eyes. One side of his thin hair was long, so that it could be brushed over the bald top of his head. He grunted at Christine, because he had not seen her yet today. He had been working when she came in, and he did not get up until after she left in the morning.

He turned and looked at the six-hundred-day clock, which swung its leisured pendulum of four gilt balls in a glass case on the mantelpiece. ‘What about dinner, Josephine?’ he asked. ‘This working man is hungry.’

‘But Geoffrey has only just come,’ his sister said, stroking the puppy. ‘He must have a glass of sherry before he and Christine go out.’ Her tone reproached him for not having thought of it before. She was his elder sister and had been reproaching him all his life for this and that. He did not mind.

Geoffrey said: ‘Thanks very much, Aunt, but I don’t drink sherry.’ He meant: Not the kind of sherry you probably have in this neck of the woods. He thought Christine’s family very suburban, and only asked her out when he could not get anyone else.

‘Well, then, we’ll have gin,’ Christine said. ‘Go and get me some ice and I’ll make martinis.’ She went to the squatting bow-fronted cupboard where bottles were kept among piles of old gramophone records, and began to pour gin and vermouth into a shaker.

Geoffrey went out to the kitchen, made a face at the cats and half raised his foot to kick the growling fox-terrier. He got out some ice cubes, with concern for his dinner-jacket, and went back into the drawing-room, where his aunt and uncle were having some kind of a small argument.

Christine dropped ice into the shaker and put on the top.

‘For God’s sake!’ said Geoffrey. ‘What are you doing? You never shake a martini.’

‘Why not?’ she asked, still shaking.

‘Because you don’t. You just stir it with a spoon or a rod. You should make it in a glass jug, anyway.’

‘Geoffrey, you’re so sophisticated,’ said Aunt Josephine damningly.

‘Don’t be silly,’ Christine said. ‘They taste just the same. They’re mixed now, anyway. Here, try one.’ She poured three glasses. ‘Daddy?’

‘No, thank you,’ he said, glancing behind him again at the clock. ‘It would spoil my dinner.’

‘They’re supposed to give you an appetite,’ she said. She brought her glass and her aunt’s over to the fireplace and they all sat down.

Aunt Josephine raised her glass, which looked very fragile in her large rough hand.’ God bless us all,’ she said.

‘Cheers,’ said Geoffrey uncheerily. He sipped at his drink with questing eyebrows, to show he knew the difference between a good martini and a bad one.

His uncle and aunt continued their argument. It was something about the standing charge on the water rate, and had been going on at intervals for days. Argument was their main form of conversation. They both enjoyed it, and neither of them ever won, because the other would never accept defeat.

Geoffrey finished his drink and stood up. ‘I think we’d better get weaving,’ he said. He had been in Air Force public relations during the war. ‘I booked the table for eight-thirty.’

‘We must finish what’s in the shaker.’ Christine went over to the cupboard, taking short steps, because the blue dress was too long. She hoped she would be able to dance in it.

Aunt Josephine put her glass down on the edge of a table, where it teetered and dropped just as Geoffrey put out his hand to catch it neatly before it reached the floor. ‘Fielded, sir,’ he told himself.

‘Thank you,’ said his aunt, unconcerned. ‘No more for me, Christine. I had better go and eat, since your father’s so fidgety.’

‘I am not fidgety,’ he said. ‘I merely like to get my dinner at the proper time, which, God knows, seems to be an impossibility in this house.’

‘You are fidgety,’ said his sister decisively. ‘Come and get my key from me, Baby dear, before you go. I’m not going to get up to open the door at the foolish hour you young things will probably come in.’ She sometimes had the fancy to treat Christine as if she were nineteen instead of thirty-four. Ordinarily Christine did not mind, but with Geoffrey there it made her feel silly.

Her father and aunt went out of the drawing-room, their voices raised in the hall, because the alsatian had scrambled the rugs in his infuriated attack on the front door. There were always disputes about the animals.

When they were in Geoffrey’s car, humming along towards the river, Geoffrey driving with hands low on the wheel, nonchalant, and flipping the smooth gears through with the crook of his fourth finger, he said: ‘There’s always so much argument in your house. It must be damn dull to live with.’

‘It’s just a habit,’ Christine said. ‘I argue, too, like mad, when I can be bothered. So does Roger. Daddy says that Granny died arguing with the doctor about whether she was going to die. You must be a throwback to one of our Quaker ancestors.’

He did not answer. He was in his high-flown, rather distant mood. Christine did not think she was going to like him much this evening.

They made desultory conversation during dinner. Geoffrey raised a lot of fuss about whether the sole was fresh and the champagne cold enough. He paid more attention to the waiters than he did to Christine.

After the champagne they had a glass of brandy and then another, and Christine liked herself better. All the drink in the world could not make her like Geoffrey very much, but it could make her feel gay inside, so that she would be able to enjoy the dance and feel a shining part of the music and the assured women and the dresses and chatter.

The dance was at Geoffrey’s club in St James’s Square. He did not leave her at the door while he parked the car, but made her go with him to find a place for the car and then walk back. After all, she was only his cousin. She meant nothing to him except a presentable partner to take to the dance. He had asked two other of his scant female acquaintance before he asked Christine.

As they went through the entrance, which looked more like a station hotel in the Midlands than one of the best clubs in London, he was at pains to impress her with the honour of being allowed to enter by these portals, instead of having to use the ladies’ entrance at the back, as she would on every other day of the year.

‘Isn’t that wonderful?’ Christine said. She was directed past some notice-boards and marble urns to a dark room behind the staircase, which was being used as a ladies’ cloakroom. Her coat was taken across a trestle table by a depressed woman in black, who had a small gas fire on her side of the table. The rest of the room was very cold, and full of goose-fleshed women eyeing one another and trying to see in the shadowed mirror.

Christine resettled Aunt Josephine’s roses and combed her hair, which had blown about walking from the car park. She looked rather nice. It seemed a waste.

Upstairs, where the club’s president and his overstuffed lady received them on a marble landing, it was also cold. It was an interval between dances. They went through to the bar, which was in the members’ library.

There were to be two other people in Geoffrey’s party. ‘Sure to find them in the bar,’ he said. ‘When in doubt about old Hubert, always look in the nearest bar.’

Sure enough, old Hubert was drinking champagne with a skeleton-thin girl in a steel-grey dress which she never would have bought if she had seen her bare back view in it. Her shoulder-blades stuck out like wings above her knobbled spine. Her hair had grown raggedly, from what might once have been a petal cut, and she had cold, fanatical eyes. She was introduced as Miss Something. Christine never did find out her name all evening.

It was a very dull dance. Geoffrey danced well, and so did Christine, but you could not hear the band at one end of the long narrow ball-room, there were too many people on the floor, and Christine’s dress was too long.

‘What’s the matter with you?’ Geoffrey asked, hanging his upper lip down at her.’ You keep falling over your feet.’

‘It’s not me, it’s you,’ she lied. ‘You shouldn’t try fancy steps if you don’t know them properly.’ She tried taking her left hand off his shoulder and holding up the skirt of her dress, but that made her feel like a dowager, so she put the hand back again. She had used too much hand lotion and some of it had come off on Geoffrey’s coat. She hoped he would not notice.

Supper was the best part of the dance. They had lobster and chicken and peach melba and a lot more champagne. Christine remembered pre-war Commemoration suppers at Oxford, and the night people threw pellets of bread at her and Jerry, because they would not talk to anyone else at the table. When she got home she would be silly and look again at that dreadful picture of the dance guests taken after sunrise on the lawn of Magdalen College. She looked all right, being only nineteen, but Jerry looked rumpled, shadowed with beard in the six-o’clock light.

Geoffrey hardly talked to her, except to ask why she took a second helping of lobster when she was already too fat. He was bored with her and thought it was a waste to spend all that money on a ticket for just a cousin. He and Hubert talked together most of the time. Christine made one or two abortive attempts to talk to Miss Something, but she appeared to be interested only in the works of Christopher Fry, and was eating as if she had not had a square meal for weeks, which was what she looked like.

Afterwards, they went to the ladies’ room together. Christine wished that her make-up would last the whole evening, as other women’s seemed to. She put on more powder, and Miss Something, who used no make-up except a purplish lipstick which had come off on her teeth during supper, stood by and watched her coldly, a bead Dorothy bag dangling uselessly from one skinny arm.

Christine began to wonder when it would be time to go home. She danced once more with Geoffrey, but then he got on to whisky and the serious business of drinking and could not be persuaded to leave the bar. She sat in a leather chair and thought about having to get up early to go to work. An ancient friend of her father’s took her away to dance. He joggled her round the room and his breath smelled of catarrhal old man.

When she got back to the bar Geoffrey said, loose-lipped and goggling behind his glasses: ‘Come on, we’ve been looking for you everywhere. Go and get your coat.’

But they were not going home. They were going on to a smashing night-club, where good old Hubert had a bottle of the best. Christine started to murmur that she had to work tomorrow, but Geoffrey thought it was silly that she was a shop girl, and paid no attention.

They were all in Geoffrey’s car, and his driving showed that he was fairly drunk. Christine’s foot kept shooting out to brake on the floorboards. This annoyed him and made him screech his tyres more than ever.

The night-club was a small cavern, with listless people drinking at tables in the dark, or draped against each other on the dance floor, which was made of lighted glass bricks.

Geoffrey’s party sat at a sofa table, and Hubert’s bottle was produced after a lot of delay and argument with the perspiring waiter. Christine did not like whisky, but there was nothing else to do but drink it and watch the half-dozen girls who came on to the floor wearing a few ostrich feathers to kick their legs and thrust their naked navels about.

While a woman with false bosoms was crooning, Hubert announced that Miss Something did not feel well and was going to be taken home. He got up with her in the middle of a song and people shushed at the disturbance they made.

Geoffrey did not want to go. He was slumped against the back of the seat with his receding chin on his crumpled shirt front, and might or might not have been asleep. When the cabaret was over Christine pinched him and suggested going home. He sat up, said: ‘God no, the night is young’, took a gulp of whisky and slumped back again. Christine felt too tired and hazy to stir him up again. She sat in the dark with her elbows on the table and a lot of smoke in her eyes and let her thoughts drift. Presently she was aware that a man at the next table was talking to her.

She smiled and shook her head, not hearing all that he was saying to her. He had dark, ungreased hair and the kind of small wrinkled face that never properly matures, but looks at any age only like a boy grown old. He was wearing a grey flannel suit and an Old Harrovian tie. He looked like hundreds of men you might meet in London, and quite safe.

Geoffrey’s mouth fell open. He was asleep. The man in the Old Harrovian tie put his hand on Christine’s knee. She removed it. She did not know how it came about, but then they were on the dance floor, and the man did not dance very well, and he held her in an excited way and laid his cheek against the side of her head.

He kissed her hair. Was it rather romantic? Christine wished she had not drunk so much, because she could not decide whether it was romantic or not; but if she had not drunk so much she would not be dancing with an unknown, excitable man and not really caring what happened next.

When the music stopped, the man took her hand and pulled her off the floor into the dim little lobby where the stairs led up to the street. ‘Wait there, my sweet,’ he said, and disappeared through a door.

Christine leaned against the wall and thought that when you were a little drunk it was your will-power that went first. You were a tool of fate, content to slide along with the drift of events. When the man came back she stared through him without recognition, because it had been dark at the table, and on the floor, where it was lighter, she had danced so close to him that she had never properly seen his face. He was smaller than she expected. He came close to her, and she recognized his touch and the texture of his suit. Ah yes, there was the Old Harrovian tie. She was static, waiting to see what would happen next.

‘Let’s go out and get some air,’ he said. ‘Come on. Please, darling.’

Was this the way a great love affair started? Christine wondered, making the usual mistake between love and alcohol. But I don’t really do this kind of thing, she thought, following him obediently up the stairs. Perhaps it’s time I did.

In the street, he said: ‘Let’s go on up to the Blue Angel. It’s much more fun than this joint.’ It had been raining. He put his arm round her waist and they walked along Oxford Street with the lights pooling red, yellow, green all down the vista of wet road, and scarcely any traffic to obey them.

He was not much taller than she was. His voice was clear and arrogantly typical of his class, but with a throbbing undertone of excitement that was communicating itself to Christine. Here I am, she thought. Picked up, and in for an adventure, perhaps.

The shop lights were all turned off. Suddenly, he pushed her into a doorway and kissed her as gracefully and successfully as if they had been before a film camera.

She did not mind. But that was dreadful of her. What was she doing? What was happening? He moved in on her and a doorknob pressed into her back. He kissed her again with less finesse and more intent, and she broke free, pushed past him out of the doorway and ran back towards the night-club, her head going faster than her feet, so that it seemed she must topple forward. The man did not follow her.

When she went down into the cavern again they were still playing the same rumba that had been clicketing in her ears when she followed the man up the stairs. Geoffrey was still sitting in the same position. He had not noticed that she had been away.

‘Let’s go,’ she said, waking him up. ‘Let’s go home, Geoffrey. It’s terribly late.’

He felt better after his sleep. He went quite amiably out with her, collected his coat and the excessive black homburg that he wore in the middle of his small head, and did a little senseless joking with the hat-check girl, who had to earn her living in black net tights and a top-hat. Christine tried to hurry him, because she was afraid the man would come back. In the street, she looked quickly up and down before she darted across to the car, although even now she did not know that she would recognize him if she saw him.

She got into the driver’s seat, not trusting to Geoffrey, but he got in at the same side and pushed her over. ‘My dear cousin,’ he said.

He drove quite carefully out to Barnes, grumbling all the way about the distance. He was such a bore. Christine wished now that she had gone with the man in the Old Harrovian tie. She often wished that she were the sort of girl who had adventures. Now she had turned one down. But it had been a small adventure, all the same, something to tell Margaret about. Margaret was not shocked at things that other people did, even though she would not have done them herself.

She would share with Margaret the fact that someone had found her attractive enough to pick up. Not being a natural pick-up, she did not know that you did not have to be especially attractive – you just had to be a woman – to get picked up by a half-drunk man in a dark night-club.

She felt excited when she thought about what might have happened to her that evening. She had missed her chance-of what? She sighed. Her bosom felt large and voluptuous and her waist very small. She wished she were driving with someone who would make love to her when the car stopped. Geoffrey was surely the biggest bore in the world. When he was in his car he thought of nothing else. Not that she would let him kiss her if he was silly enough to try. The thought made her giggle.

‘You drank too much tonight,’ Geoffrey told her censoriously.

‘So did you.’

‘My dear child.’ He sighed. ‘When you can hold your liquor as well as me, you’ll have something to be proud of.’ He turned in at the soft side-road that led to ‘Roselawn’ with a skidding sweep.

‘The outposts of Empire,’ he said as he stopped outside her home.

‘Coming in for a drink?’

‘No, thanks. I’ve got miles to go back,’ he said, trying to make her feel bad about living so far out. His side of the family, with their money and their house in Regent’s Park, had always rather looked down on the Copes, and been known to explain them away at parties as ‘my suburban relations’.

The Copes thought Geoffrey and his excitable widowed mother very silly, and explained him away as ‘he can’t help being like that’.

He would not see her to the door. He never did. Christine said good-bye to him in the car, and then remembered.

‘Geoffrey, I haven’t got a key. I forgot to ask Aunt Josephine.’

‘You’ll have to wake her up then.’ He switched on the ignition.

‘What time is it?’

‘Three o’clock.’

‘Oh, I can’t. She hates being woken up, and Daddy probably wouldn’t answer, even if he heard me. He’d think it was burglars at last. Come with me and let’s see if there’s a window open somewhere.’

‘You don’t need me. You know the house better than I do.’

‘I can’t go prowling round on my own. Suppose a policeman came? Look, you must. One doesn’t just leave a girl to break into a house by herself.’

The man in the Old Harrovian tie would have thought it fun to do it with her. They would have crept about in the dark holding hands, and he would have pressed her against the wall of the house and kissed her. She could imagine the ivy cushiony and damp at her back.

She shivered. ‘Please, Geoff, come and help me.’

‘Oh, all right, all right.’ Grumbling, he twisted his long legs out of the car, stood up and stretched in the sandy road and yawned vastly at the night.

‘Shut up,’ said Christine, taking his arm. ‘You’ll wake the dogs, then there’ll be hell to pay. Come on.’

He staggered a little going up the path. He was not as sober as he thought. He followed Christine all round the house on exaggerated tiptoe, cursing when he put his foot into a flowerbed. They tried the back door and all the lower windows with no success.

‘The landing window,’ Christine whispered, looking up from the front door. ‘The one half-way up the stairs. They sometimes forget to lock that. Look, if I stand on your shoulders I could reach it.’

‘Damn,’ said Geoffrey, tripping over an iron hoop that was meant to keep dogs off the bulbs. ‘My God no, a great girl like you. You’ll break my back.’

‘You’re so rude,’ said Christine. She giggled. This was rather fun. She kicked off her shoes, made Geoffrey clasp his hands in front of him, stood on them teetering, with his face pressed into her skirt, put one foot on his shoulder and tried to put the other foot up as well, holding on to the ivy and the tiny gable above the front door.

He staggered, crumpled and collapsed to the ground with her on top of him. He pushed her off roughly and stood up, brushing off his clothes. The situation affronted him.

‘This is ridiculous,’ he said. ‘I’m going to ring the bell.’ He looked sillier than ever with his oiled hair standing up in spikes.

‘No, please –’ She caught his arm. ‘Don’t. If Aunt Josephine wakes in the night she never gets to sleep again, and then she’ll have a headache all tomorrow, and it’s her day for the Putney Incurables.’

‘As if they hadn’t got enough to bear without that crazy old woman –’

‘Shut up,’ said Christine, ‘and do something. If you put your foot on that bit of iron sticking out of the bricks there, you could stand up and reach the window.’

‘So could you.’

‘I’m not tall enough. You are. Or don’t you think you could make it? You’re afraid you’ll tumble down, I suppose.’

‘God damn it,’ said Geoffrey, his voice in his nose, ‘I am not afraid. I’m just bloody well fed up with fooling around here with you when I ought to be in bed.’

He was so cross that he wrenched off his coat and threw it on the ground without worrying whether it got dirty. He put one narrow shoe on the rusty iron peg which once supported the wistaria that Christine’s mother had loved, clutched the gable, hoisted himself up with a grunt that was more like a squeak, and got his hands on the window-sill. He stood there, one foot waving behind him in the air, and his body flattened against the house.

‘Can you open it?’ asked Christine, wanting to laugh.

‘I could, if I could let go with one hand,’ he gasped, clinging on desperately.

‘Of course you can. It’s easy.’

‘Oh, it’s easy, is it? All right -’ He shifted his weight, raised one hand to the bar of the sash window, and at that moment there came a swelling roar from inside the house and the alsatian hurled itself, all teeth and claws, against the inside of the window. Geoffrey shrieked, waved his hand wildly, leaned backwards and fell with whirling arms and legs at Christine’s feet, half on the path, half in the flowerbed.

When the bolts and chains of the front door shot back and Christine’s father and aunt appeared in the light from the hall, he holding the alsatian by its chain collar, she holding a torch and the front of her peignoir, Christine was kneeling on the gravel, dabbing at the gaping cut on Geoffrey’s eyebrow with the skirt of her dress. She felt cold with fear, yet resigned already to the emergency that life had suddenly become. It had happened. Something awful had happened. Geoffrey was unconscious and badly hurt, and the night was broken into crisis and cries and all sorts of breathless, bustling things to do.

They got him inside and laid him on the sofa. He was like a figure stuffed with sawdust and his silly face was leaden. Aunt Josephine was stanching the wound with pillowslips from her mending basket, her big face noble, as if she were saving a bleeding soldier hero with strips torn from her petticoat.

Mr Cope wanted to do something. He got out the brandy. Christine came back from telephoning the doctor just in time to see him trying to force the neck of the bottle into Geoffrey’s dead-looking mouth.

She had never noticed that Geoffrey had false teeth. He must have a very good dentist, she thought absently, as she pulled back her father’s arm. ‘Don’t give him that!’ she cried.

‘First aid,’ he said, surprised. ‘Always give ‘em brandy. I thought you’d been a nurse.’

‘The only thing I remember from it is that you never give stimulants to a patient with a head wound. He may have a fractured skull or compression of the brain or something. Oh Daddy, isn’t it awful?’

She wanted to be comforted, because it was her fault. She put her hand on her father’s arm, which felt soft and fat under the silk of his pyjamas.

He stiffened, as he always did if you tried to caress him. He turned away and poured a glass of brandy for himself. ‘God knows, I need it,’ he said, as if he were the only one who had had a shock.

The alsatian was still snarling and prowling round the room, giving off sudden throaty barks, to show that its outrage was not yet appeased.

‘Can’t you shut that animal up?’ Christine asked, coming back with a hot-water bottle to put under the rug that covered Geoffrey. ‘It’s all his fault, anyway. He made Geoffrey fall.’

‘He was only doing his job,’ said her father, ‘and I must say, apart from what’s happened, I’m glad of the showing he made.’

‘You’re glad!’ Aunt Josephine looked up. ‘When here’s that poor Geoffrey bleeding to death on your sofa.’

‘He’s not bleeding to death. You’ve stopped the blood, like the sensible woman you are. And he’s coming round now, anyway. Look at him.’

‘No wonder, with the noise you and that dog are making. Go up and put on your dressing-gown before the doctor comes.’

‘I will not go up. I’m perfectly decent.’

They were still arguing when the doctor arrived; not their own family doctor, but a cavernous, monosyllabic man, who had just been climbing wearily into bed after a confinement when the summons from ‘Roselawn’ caught him.

Geoffrey was fully conscious by now, not fussing, but appearing to accept the situation without surprise. The doctor took some things out of his bag, went away to wash his hands and came back to take scissors and needles and silk out of the sterile cases that Christine opened for him. She tried to do things for him without being asked, efficiently, to show she had been a nurse, but it was not like it had been in hospital. It was quicker and more casual. In hospital there would have been a tremendous boiling-up of sterilizers, and people rushing about with trolleys and sterile towels and kidney dishes. The doctor simply threaded a needle, squared his elbows and bent over Geoffrey. He had not even taken off his overcoat.

‘You’re not going to stitch him up without an anaesthetic?’ asked Aunt Josephine.

‘He won’t feel it. He’s drunk as a goat.’ Geoffrey grinned foolishly, as if at a compliment. Aunt Josephine looked startled, and then stared at Christine and gave her one of her awkward winks that did not fit in with her long solemn face.

Mr Cope said: ‘Oh’, and walked away. He was more shocked at Geoffrey being drunk than at him being stitched up without an anaesthetic. He did not watch the stitching. The other two did, and while they were getting Geoffrey to bed in the spare room that looked over the garden at the back, Mr Cope went to his own room and locked the door loudly, as a sign that he cared for no more disturbance that night.

‘You’ve had quite a lot to drink too, haven’t you?’ Aunt Josephine asked Christine, looking across the bed as they tucked the blankets round Geoffrey’s cold feet.

‘A bit.’

‘Did you have a nice time?’

Christine looked at Geoffrey. He was asleep. ‘Not very,’ she said.

‘Well, I never thought you would. That’s the finish of that dress, anyway,’ said Aunt Josephine, looking at the blood on Christine’s skirt. ‘I’ll take my roses now, if you’ll just unpin them.’

Christine looked down guiltily. ‘Oh, thank goodness,’ she said. ‘They’re not spoiled.’ She gave them to her aunt.

‘Yes, thank goodness,’ said Aunt Josephine, carrying them carefully out of the room like a bridal posy. ‘They escaped disaster. They looked lovely on you. You shall wear them again some time if you like.’

Christine kissed her aunt on the landing. She felt she should say something. ‘Sorry,’ she said brusquely, jerking her hand towards the spare-room door. ‘Sorry about all this.’

‘Gracious me,’ said Aunt Josephine easily. ‘It adds a spice to life.’ She went into her room and Christine heard her talking to the puppy which was sleeping on her bed.

In her bedroom, Christine did not feel tired or sleepy. She stepped out of the ruined dress, threw away her laddered stockings and dawdled over creaming her face and doing her hair. What a night, she thought. What a night. She sat up in bed and went over the events of the evening, and she remembered the kiss in the doorway more clearly than the details of what had happened with Geoffrey.

She had forgotten to look at the picture of herself and Jerry at the Commemoration ball at Oxford. She got out of bed again and took out the picture from where it was rolled up with her old school photographs in the bottom drawer of her desk. Kneeling, she spread it on the floor and put a hand on each end to keep it flat. There he was, Jerry, rumpled and unshaven.

When you kissed me, in those days, it wasn’t anything like tonight in the doorway. You were so innocent, only I didn’t know it, because I was too. None of those other Canadians in the ice-hockey team can have been like you were. When you got a bit carried away, like that time in the hay barn at Jennifer’s, you used to say afterwards: ‘Forgive me, darling’ and be afraid that I minded.

Christine smiled, rolled up the photograph again and put it away with the pictures of herself in the cricket team and the swimming eight, and the panoramic photograph of the whole school and all the mistresses making funny mouths, taken with a slowly turning camera on the tennis courts in Jubilee year. She got into bed and turned out the light. The room was not dark now and she shut her eyes and began to worry about having to get up in a few hours’ time, and what she would feel like at work.

She was late getting up in the morning. A weight pressed on her eyes and her mouth was dry as sandpaper. When she went downstairs she could hear Aunt Josephine in the hall, telephoning to Geoffrey’s mother. Christine went into the kitchen, where her aunt had put coffee and toast and half a grapefruit on the table for her. The butter was under a plate, because of the cats.

When Christine had a hangover it always made her hungry. It seemed a long time ago that she had eaten dinner with Geoffrey, and much had happened since then. She finished the grapefruit and the toast and was cutting a slice of bread when Aunt Josephine came in. She wore a net over her yellow-grey hair and a stiff new flowered overall that looked like the loose cover for a sofa. She sat down at the kitchen table and poured herself a cup of coffee. A cat mewed against her leg.

‘How did Aunt Lottie take it?’ asked Christine.

‘Badly. Being woken so early gave her a sense of calamity. If she would get up at a reasonable hour like we do she wouldn’t take things so ill.’

‘My hour isn’t so reasonable,’ Christine said. ‘I’m dreadfully late, even worse than usual. Mr Parker doesn’t mind, but sooner or later someone’s going to find out I’m never in on time, and then I shan’t be the estimable Miss Cope any more.’ The manager had once called her that at a staff conference, and the family had never let her forget it.

‘You won’t have time to get my wool then,’ said Aunt Josephine sadly.

‘Oh Lord, I’m sorry, no. I’ll have to go straight to my own department. I’ll go early on Monday and get it. I promise.’

‘I could have done two or three of those pilches over the weekend.’

‘Well, the Balkan Orphans can wait a few days. They’re in bad enough shape as it is.’

‘That’s just the trouble.’ Aunt Josephine leaned on the table despondently. She bore the world’s troubles on her back. She saw all the babies from all the ruined homes behind the Iron Curtain running about freezing to death because Christine had not got up early enough to buy her some wool to knit drawers for them.

‘I tell you what,’ she said, brightening. ‘Why don’t you take Geoffrey’s car to work?’

‘He’d never let me. It’s his treasure.’

‘Don’t ask him.’ Aunt Josephine levered one side of her face into her brand of wink. ‘I don’t want him wakened, anyway. You’ll be back with it when he goes this afternoon. His mother’s coming to take him away after lunch - “in the Rolls,” she informed me, as if I didn’t know she had one.’

The idea of driving comfortably to work in Geoffrey’s car instead of waiting on the windy road at the corner of the common for the bus and then joining the battle for the train at Hammersmith Broadway was so tempting that Christine did not let herself think twice about it. She took the car and got to Goldwyn’s early enough to buy Aunt Josephine’s wool from the flushed woman in Art Needlework, and get to her own department in time to hustle the juniors over their dusting.

‘I say, Miss Cope, you do look rough this morning,’ Alice said gaily. ‘Aren’t you quite the thing?’

‘I’m fine, thank you.’

‘Had a night out, I expect,’ Alice said. ‘I must say that’s the only thing I’m glad I’m so young for. It doesn’t show on me.’

Christine went away to tell Margaret of the night’s adventures. Since Mr Parker would not be in this morning, they went into his little jumbled office and lit cigarettes, with one eye for shadows coming up to the stippled glass partition.

Saturdays were usually fairly quiet. Most people were busy buying food, and the chief customers were college students looking for technical books and children clutching five shillings in an agony of choice. Christine and Margaret usually had a cigarette or two on a Saturday morning. Even if you did not especially want one, it was enjoyable because it was illicit, like smoking in the ward bathroom on night duty, when Night Sister might come round on rubber soles at any time and catch you.

Margaret enjoyed the story about Geoffrey, whom she had disliked ever since Christine had brought him to a party at her house and he had criticized the colour of the curtains. The story of the man in the Old Harrovian tie fell rather flat. She was not shocked. She listened without comment, but in the telling it became, not a romantic adventure, but something quite sordid.

Margaret suddenly got up and went to the door. ‘I’m going to have a baby.’ She threw it out casually, not looking at Christine, as if she were almost embarrassed about announcing a baby after twelve years.

‘Darling Maggie, how wonderful!’ Christine looked at her, intrigued by the secret changes unguessed within the familiar neat exterior. Margaret seemed suddenly remote. Pregnant women lead an introverted life that no one else can share.

‘I think it’s terribly exciting!’ Christine was over-enthusiastic, as always at news like this, to smother the little jealous stab that wished it could be her. ‘Isn’t Laurie pleased?’

‘Well, I suppose so. He’s surprised. He treats me as if I were a phenomenon, producing at my age. It makes me feel terribly old.’ Margaret went briskly off among the books. Miss Burman came up to Christine with a muddled query about encyclopaedias, and the morning went on.

Since they were not busy, Christine had time to feel tired and a little sick from last night. She was buoyed up by the thought of driving home in Geoffrey’s car. If she could come to work in a car every day, life would be a fine thing. Her father never let her take his stolid black car, which had been laid up with bricks under the axles during the war and had never run properly since.

Christine overtipped the car-park man, because Geoffrey’s grey coupé made her feel grand, and drove rather showily among the westbound traffic, looking without pity on the lines of people at the bus stops, who might have been herself.

Miss Burman, who was getting a lift to West Kensington, squeaked and exclaimed and leaned forward, holding on to the door. She was gratifyingly though sickeningly impressed. If only she would not keep saying: ‘My stars! I don’t get a ride in a car from one year’s end to the next’, one might be more sorry for her.

‘Here’s where you get out,’ said Christine. ‘I’ll stop for you while the lights are red.’

Miss Burman had dropped her handbag on the floor and could not find it. She had difficulty getting out of the car, and by the time she had staggered to the pavement with her hat askew, leaned in to tell Christine once again how surprised Mother would be to see her home so early and shut the door without latching it properly, the lights had been green and were now red again.

Christine turned on the radio and opened the window so that the man in the old car next to her could hear that she had a radio. The car made her feel superior. Ordinarily, she did not have much to be superior about. After Hammersmith Bridge she let Geoffrey’s car out far over the speed limit and arrived home feeling happy.

Aunt Josephine met her at the door with a face that wiped some of the smile off Christine’s. ‘The doctor’s been,’ she said hollowly.

‘How’s Geoff?’

‘It’s bad news, I’m afraid.’ Aunt Josephine bent to straighten the rugs that the alsatian had scattered when he heard the car stop.

‘What do you mean? Is it a fractured skull? Is he dying or something?’

‘Heavens, why should he be? He’ll be all right, but the doctor says he can’t be moved for at least a week.’

‘Oh gosh,’ said Christine. She looked at her aunt. Her aunt looked at her. With Geoffrey ill upstairs, it would be unkind to say what they thought.

Aunt Josephine made a face. ‘I shall look after him like my own child,’ she said theatrically and went away to dish up lunch.

After lunch Christine followed her aunt into the kitchen and said: ‘I’ll do the washing-up, if you want to get off to the Incurables.’

‘I’m not going,’ Aunt Josephine said in a martyred voice, rolling up her sleeves and turning on taps.

‘Of course you are.’ Aunt Josephine went every week to read to the inmates of the Putney Home for Incurables. They loved her. Other visitors read what they thought was good for the Incurables. Aunt Josephine read them what they liked, which was love stories and thrillers.

‘They’ll die if you don’t go,’ Christine said.

‘They’re dying, anyway,’ said her aunt gloomily. ‘I can’t go, with that body upstairs to look after.’

‘I’ll look after Geoffrey. Don’t be difficult. Here, get away from that sink and let me get on with the dishes.’

Aunt Josephine put on a heavy coat like a travelling rug and a red felt toque which she clung to in the teeth of all opposition, and went off to Putney. When Christine had put away the plates and silver she made coffee and took a cup into her father’s study. He was working, crouched like an ape over the big varnished desk under the window which looked over the neglected lawn.

Since he retired from his job in the Ministry of Pensions he had occupied himself by translating French novels into rather stilted English. It was not very lucrative work, and he was slow at it, because, although he had been brought up in France, his French had rusted over the years and he spent more time consulting dictionaries than actually writing anything, but it kept him busy and he enjoyed it. It made him feel that he was part of the literary world. When he had to enter his occupation on any form, he did not put ‘Retired Civil Servant’; he put ‘Author’, and he behaved as temperamentally about his work as any creative writer.

Christine took another cup of coffee up to the spare room. Geoffrey was lying in twilight with the curtains drawn. He had been sitting up, but when he heard the door handle turn he slid down under the bedclothes and lay flat with his eyes closed.

‘How do you feel, Geoff?’ Christine asked, coming up to the bed.

‘Got a headache.’

‘Poor dear. I’ll just take your tray. Oh, good, you’ve eaten your lunch. That’s fine.’

‘Well, I just had a taste of soup,’ Geoffrey grumbled without opening his eyes. ‘What was it made of? Bones the dogs wouldn’t eat?’ But the bowl and the plate of toast were empty, and Christine had seen the amount of soup Aunt Josephine had taken up.

She knocked against the bed as she picked up the tray, and he gave an irritable exclamation and opened his eyes, which were pale and unfamiliar without his glasses. With the bandage low on his forehead, he looked like Suzanne Lenglen in her bandeau. His hair stuck up in points above the bandage.

‘I thought I heard my car a while ago,’ he said. ‘You haven’t been driving it, have you?’

Aunt Josephine had said that he was not to be excited. ‘How could you possibly hear it from this side of the house?’ Christine hedged.’ Quite a lot of cars go along our road.’

‘I’d know the sound of mine anywhere.’ He closed the eye under the wound and looked at her with the other one. ‘Have you been driving it? I wouldn’t put it past you.’

‘Of course not.’ Christine put down the tray and went to the window to move the curtains.

‘Well, in any case,’ he said sulkily. ‘I want you to take it to a garage today. It can’t stand out all the time.’

The nearest garage was far away. If she took the car there she would have to walk back right across the Common. ‘But, Geoff,’ she said, coming back to the bed, ‘it wouldn’t hurt. It’s quite warm and it isn’t going to rain. Why, Americans leave their cars out all the time, even in winter. Hardly any of them have garages.’

‘I don’t care what the Americans do!’ he said loudly, raising himself bolt upright like Lazarus in his coffin. ‘Horrible people. It’s my car, and it’s all your fault that I’m lying here, and the least you could do –’

‘Whatever is going on?’ asked Geoffrey’s mother, surging into the room all furs and bags and umbrellas. ‘Geoffrey, my darling boy!’ She hurried to the bed and dropped magazines and flowers on his feet. ‘You’re dangerously ill and you’re supposed to be kept quiet, and my goodness, how uncomfortable you look! Christine, whatever are you thinking about, and you a nurse!’

Echoes of the remark made so often to Christine by so many irate ward sisters. ‘How did you get in, Aunt Lottie?’ she asked sulkily. ‘I didn’t hear the bell.’

‘The front door was open, in your usual charming country style,’ said Aunt Lottie coldly. She swarmed over the bed. She was a large woman, and she gave forth a lot of voice and perfume and a kind of invisible ectoplasm of high-pressure living that took up a lot of space in the air around her. ‘Oh, my poor Geoffrey,’ she said. ‘This is surely a terrible thing. I don’t for the life of me see how it could have happened. Tell me all about it.’

‘It was all the fault of that damned dog,’ he began, putting on the whining tone of a small boy with a doting mother.

‘I knew it! All those animals. I knew they’d be the ruin of this family some day. The house is like a menagerie. Why, when I came in a great brown-and-white monster came at me with slavering jaws, and if I hadn’t run for my life up the stairs –’

‘That was my dog,’ said Christine. ‘Timmy wouldn’t hurt a fly. If he was slavering, it was because he can smell his dinner cooking.’

Aunt Lottie ignored her. She hovered with voluptuous exclamations over Geoffrey, who lay back, looking quite flat, like a typhoid patient sinking into the mattress.

Christine brought a chair up to the bed. ‘Let me get you a cup of tea, Aunt Lottie.’

‘I don’t care for any, thank you. I’ve just had my lunch, but I dare say Robbins would be grateful for a cup, if you would invite him into the kitchen. Don’t you bother about me. I just want to talk to my son. Now tell me, Geoffrey. I want to hear all about this dreadful accident.’

Dismissed, Christine went downstairs and brought Aunt Lottie’s chauffeur into the kitchen and gave him tea and cake and talked to him about murder trials, while she mixed scones to surprise Aunt Josephine when she came home from the Incurables.

She had her hands in the dough when the spare-room bell rang.

‘Just as if I was a servant,’ Christine said.

‘I know, miss,’ said the chauffeur with feeling. ‘Wouldn’t it drive you off your natural.’

‘Something always happens when you start to make scones.’ Christine scraped the dough off her fingers into the bowl, washed her hands and went up to the spare room. Aunt Lottie was winding herself into her blue foxes.

‘I’m ready to go now,’ she said. ‘Geoffrey wants to sleep, and the poor boy must have all the rest he can. I only wish we could have got him home.’

‘So do I,’ said Christine. ‘I mean - you’d be happier to have him with you.’

‘Please have Robbins go to the front door for me,’ said Aunt Lottie, as if she were ordering her carriage and pair round to the door.

She was coming down the stairs as Christine came back from the kitchen. ‘Geoffrey has told me the whole story,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t embarrass you, Christine, by saying so in front of him, but I consider it was foolhardy of you, very foolhardy indeed. Rash of Geoffrey, of course, but he was only trying to be gentlemanly.’

‘He would have left me to get in by myself,’ Christine protested, ‘if I hadn’t absolutely made him help.’

Aunt Lottie’s attention was diverted by the large cardboard box of clothes and toys which Aunt Josephine had put out for the nuns to collect. She poked at it with her umbrella.

‘You never know what you’ll find standing about in the hall of this house,’ she said, and went out, raising her suède-gloved hand to Robbins as if she were hailing a cab.

When Roger arrived on Sunday morning, the first thing he saw was his sister walking through the hall with a tray of dirty bandages and bloodstained cotton wool.

‘Ha!’ he said. ‘The estimable Miss Cope. What’s happened? One of the tykes been fighting?’ He always called the dogs the Tykes, just as he called his father The Aged Parent, or The Aged P., and his wife The Little Woman. He seldom called anything by its right name, because he liked to make a joke about everything in the world, even the war, which he referred to as ‘that small scrap we had with the Nastys’. He called Aunt Josephine Jo-Jo the Dog-faced Boy, or simply Dogface, and his two children, who bore the lyrical names of Clement and Jeanette, were always known as Champ and Boots.

The children followed their mother into the hall, round-eyed, looking for trouble. They opened the door of the grandfather clock and played with the weights, while Christine unfolded the story of Geoffrey.

Roger roared with laughter, but his wife Sylvia frowned and said: ‘I don’t think it’s funny at all. Poor Geoffrey might have been killed.’

‘The little woman wasn’t born with our sense of humour,’ Roger said. ‘Now, kids, don’t let your grandfather catch you messing about with that clock.’

‘Oh, he won’t mind,’ said Jeanette. She meant: He will mind, but we don’t mind if he minds. The elder Cope so seldom spoke to them without censure that it bothered them no more than a fly on the window-pane.

‘Well, anyhow, run along and muck about somewhere till lunch-time,’ their father said. ‘Champ, your flies are undone again. That boy! He’ll be arrested yet. Where’s Dogface? In the galley, I suppose.’ He went down the passage past the stairs to the kitchen.

He was a large man with too much energy and no acquaintance with relaxation. The house was noisy and restless on Sundays when he was there. His wife was quiet and unobtrusive, perhaps because she had long ago given up hope of competing for attention. Christine supposed that she loved Roger because he was her brother, but they had never been close. Ever since she could remember, he had always laughed at her, and she had never been able to share her emotions with him or take him her problems.

‘There’s a new puppy,’ she told the children, who were now exploring Aunt Josephine’s box for the nuns. ‘She’s out on the lawn. You can take her out of the run if you don’t let her get on to the road.’

The boy and girl looked at her with delight, then looked at each other with secret faces, making the idea that a grown-up had given them entirely their own.

‘Jeanette is growing out of all her dresses,’ Sylvia said, as they ran out of the door, with Christine’s dog scrambling after them. ‘I wish I had another daughter to put into them.’

‘Why didn’t you?’ asked Christine.

‘You know I couldn’t, after Clemmie.’

‘Oh yes, of course, I forgot. Why didn’t you adopt one then, if you wanted another child?’

‘Well, we did and we didn’t.’ Sylvia took off her coat and hung it on the hall stand, which was piled with old coats and hats that nobody wore any more. ‘And an adopted child-I don’t know that it’s too satisfactory. They nearly always suffer from emotional insecurity.’ She was quoting something that she had read.

‘Not if you treat them properly,’ said Christine, holding the tray of dressings on her hip. ‘I’ve always thought that if I don’t marry I shall adopt a child.’

‘You couldn’t,’ said Sylvia, smoothing down her dry reddish hair in the mirror that was partly obscured by all the clothes that hung on the stand. ‘Single women aren’t allowed by law to adopt children.’

‘I’m sure I could if I really set about it,’ Christine said, irritated by Sylvia’s submissive acceptance of everything she was told. ‘There were two women won a case about it some years ago. Don’t you remember? I’d manage it somehow, and if I had a child –’

‘Well, don’t let’s stand about in this cold hall all day,’ said Sylvia, going towards the drawing-room. ‘Don’t you want to go and get rid of that tray?’

Christine had wanted to continue the conversation where she was, with the unappetising tray of dressings balanced on her hip. The most interesting things never cropped up when you were sitting comfortably in chairs. It was always in transient places like halls or staircases or bathroom doorways that the really important things started to be said and you had to discuss them then and there, because the mood was lost if you moved away to a more suitable place.

Some of the major events of her life had come to her when she was passing through this wide chilly hall, with its grandfather clock that told the months and days of the week, its loaded hatstand, and its huge gilt-framed print of Queen Victoria’s coronation. It was here that her father had come from the telephone and told her that her mother had died in the nursing-home. It was here that Maurice had plucked up courage on his way out of the front door and looked back over his shoulder to ask her to marry him, and here that she had stood in her nightdress and read the letter from Jerry, which said that he was on leave in England.

But Sylvia did not like halls, and she was not interested in the problems of a woman who loved children, but had no husband to give them to her. She went into the drawing-room and poked the fire, and Christine took her tray out to the kitchen and then came back to pour sherry for all the family.

The Sunday was like so many other Sundays. It started off with everyone friendly and glad to see each other, and ended with a dyspeptic bickering, after they had eaten too much lunch and tea.

At one o’clock Mr Cope came in from his study, rubbing his eyes to show he had been writing.

‘Hullo there, aged P.!’ called Roger from the fireplace, where he was straddling to warm his behind. ‘How’s the magnum opus?’

‘Pretty fair. I make slow progress though, and the publishers want it in a month’s time. They never will realize that translating is a highly meticulous art and can’t be rushed.’

‘Philistines, all of them.’ Roger shouted his laugh, which went: ‘Ha-ha-ha!’ on the air, like a bubble coming out of the mouth of a character in a comic strip. ‘What are you on to next? Why don’t they give you something Parisian and sexy for a change? It would warm the cockles of your old age. Get the old glands gushing again.’

His father ignored this. He did not think Roger should talk like this in front of Sylvia. She was a favourite with him. He considered her one of the few really nice girls he knew.

She played up to him. She called him Copey, and made a great point of fussing over him and paying him respect, as if she did not think he got enough of it from his family. She brought him his sherry now, and settled him in an armchair, telling Roger to move over so that his father could get some of the fire.

Aunt Josephine came in from the kitchen with her face and hands red and some of the hairpins slipping out of her heavy hair. Christine went out to fetch the children, who had already got themselves dirty. She helped them to wash in the little lobby under the stairs. If she left them alone they would just hold their hands under the cold tap and wipe some of the dirt off on a towel, so she washed their hands in her own, liking the feel of the strong clutching little paws in hers.

She washed their faces with the corner of a wet towel, and they shut their eyes and pursed their soft mouths. She looked in the mirror over the basin and imagined that she was their mother. When she was drying Jeanette’s face she bent and kissed her.

‘Why do you do that?’ asked Clement with interest, swinging on the towel rail. ‘You always kiss us.’

‘Don’t you like it?’

‘Oh, we don’t mind.’ His face shone and his black hair was combed wet and flat to his round head.

‘It’s because I love you,’ Christine said, untying Jeanette’s bow, which was slipping off the end of her forelock. ‘Doesn’t Mummy kiss you?’

‘Not too much,’ said the boy. ‘She says it’s unhygienic.’

‘She often has a cold, you know,’ said Jeanette seriously, admiring herself in the mirror. ‘She suffers terribly with her sinuses.’

Sylvia always did sniffle a bit. Her small coloured handkerchiefs were often at her freckled nose, and her voice had a slightly nasal pitch.

At lunch Roger carved the roast beef at the sideboard, and the children took the plates to Aunt Josephine, who added vegetables and gravy.

Mr Cope said, as he said at every Sunday lunch: ‘It was a relief to me when you got old enough to carve, Roger. The carver never gets a chance at his own food before people are wanting second helpings.’

‘You hardly ever carved,’ said Aunt Josephine. ‘Catherine used to do it when she was alive, and after that I did.’

‘Isn’t there any more horse-radish?’ he asked, digging in the bottom of the jar. ‘This stuff is growing mushrooms.’

‘You know there isn’t,’ said Aunt Josephine. ‘We had all that out at supper last night.’

‘At school,’ Jeanette said, going carefully round the table with a plate, ‘we aren’t allowed to have seconds, even when there’s heaps left.’

‘They don’t starve you,’ said Roger. ‘And don’t say seconds.’ He pointed the carving-knife at her with a threatening grimace.

‘Why not?’

‘Because it’s common, dear,’ said Sylvia, patting her mouth with a napkin, although she had eaten nothing yet.

‘Well, everybody says seconds,’ persisted Jeanette, ‘and everybody isn’t common, or you wouldn’t send me there.’

‘Quiet, Boots,’ said her father. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘I’m afraid she does,’ said Aunt Josephine. ‘Cut me a nice thin slice for Geoffrey, will you, Roger, and someone can take up his tray.’

‘Let me, let me!’ clamoured the children. They did not like Geoffrey, but now he was exciting, because he was in bed behind a closed door and they had been forbidden to go in.

‘No, troops,’ said Roger. ‘You’d drop the tray.’

‘You can come up with me if you like,’ Christine said, ‘but you must be very quiet.’

‘I don’t approve of all this getting up and running about at meals,’ said Mr Cope.’ We never get a peaceful lunch. Let those children sit down and get on with their food.’

But they were already out of the door after Christine. They tiptoed into the spare room and stood at attention at the end of the bed, staring at Geoffrey. He did not speak to them, and so they did not like to say Hullo.

Christine rearranged the pillows and put the bed-table across his knees. He had been smoking, and there was ash on the sheets and on the front of his pyjamas.

‘The doctor said you weren’t to smoke yet,’ she told him.

‘Might as well be dead,’ he said. ‘What’s this?’ He poked at the food with a fork. ‘I don’t know that I want any.’

‘Now, you’ve got to eat that all up,’ ordered Christine, to save his face, because she knew that he really wanted to eat it, but was afraid that he would not be thought ill if he did.

She went out with the children, and they asked her eagerly on the landing: ‘Is he dying?’

‘Not yet,’ she said, ‘but he has a terrible big wound, you know. The doctor had to put eight stitches in it.’

She knew that they would enjoy hearing about the stitching, and they did. She told them about it as they went downstairs, and about how much blood there had been. They would retail it to their mother when they got home, and Sylvia would disapprove.

Christine suspected herself of trying to curry favour with the children by telling them things that they would not hear from other grown-ups. She knew she should not try to make them find her better company than their parents, but she could not help it. She was jealous for their affection. Once, Jeanette had said to her in one of her rare moments of clutching warmth: ‘I love you better than Mummy!’; and although Christine had said: ‘Hush, of course you don’t’, she had exulted in her heart.

After lunch she played cricket with the children on the lawn. They screamed and yelled, and Geoffrey kept ringing his bell to complain about the noise. The family had tea too soon after lunch, because Roger and Sylvia had to get back to Farnborough. Aunt Josephine had made cakes and scones, and everyone ate them, although they were not hungry.

Sunday was a day of eating and lying about in chairs with the Sunday papers. It was a day of earned indulgence, but it made you feel unhealthy.

The family had said all the fresh things there were to say after a week’s separation. Local gossip had been exchanged on both sides. Aunt Josephine had given Sylvia her new recipe for icecream without cream. Sylvia had told what the doctor had said about Clement’s ears, Roger and his father had discussed the Budget, and now there was a lull, when they were all a little tired of each other.

The children had been careering about all day, missing their usual afternoon rest, and were ready to quarrel with each other or anyone else. Clement reached for the jam, Jeanette slapped his hand in a prissy way, and he spilled his milk on the carpet. His father shouted at him to go and fetch a cloth and his face dissolved in tears.

‘I wish you wouldn’t shout at him,’ said Sylvia mildly.

‘If it wasn’t for me,’ Roger said, ‘there would be no discipline at all in this family. You’re much too soft with them.’ Jeanette watched him narrowly, nibbling the icing of her cake.

‘It’s all very well for fathers,’ Aunt Josephine said, scenting a quarrel, and entering battle with alacrity. ‘They’re out all day while the mother copes with the children, and then they come back and behave like God Almighty for an hour or so, until the mother takes the children away and has the trouble of trying to get them to bed after the father has upset them.’

‘You’re right, Aunt Jo,’ said Christine. ‘Men are an awful nuisance in a family.’

‘Without the men,’ said Roger, guffawing, ‘there ain’t going to be no family. Isn’t that so, Aged?’ He dug his father in the ribs. Mr Cope edged his chair away.

‘I think men are hell,’ said Aunt Josephine placidly.

Sylvia frowned and shook her head. She did not like words like hell used in front of the children.

‘Just because you could never get one for yourself-’ began Mr Cope and stopped himself before he could commit sacrilege on his sister’s far-off broken romance.’ This tea is abominable.’ He drained his cup. ‘I don’t believe you ever boil the water before you make it.’

‘If you know so much about it,’ said Aunt Josephine, ‘why don’t you sometimes come out to the kitchen and help me? Slave, slave, slave for you, and all I get is criticism.’

‘Destructive criticism at that,’ put in Christine. ‘The worst kind.’

‘Now don’t you all be mean to poor Copey,’ said Sylvia. ‘He’s the easiest man I ever –’

‘Don’t be smug,’ said her husband. ‘Sucking up to the old man, as if he had something to leave you. I suppose you’re trying to imply that I’m difficult.’ They argued on, half joking, half disgruntled. Jeanette sat on the edge of her chair and looked uncertainly from one to the other. The alsatian lying by Mr Cope grumbled in his throat, and the two love-birds in the cage by the window began to shuffle up and down their perch and squawk in accompaniment to the voices.

Clement came back from the kitchen still whimpering and began to mop up the carpet. Christine and Aunt Josephine both noticed that he had brought a clean dishtowel, but said nothing.

They bickered on for a while, keeping the argument going for argument’s sake, and when it was time for Roger and his family to go they were all quite pleased that Sunday was over. Aunt Josephine wanted to clean up the kitchen. Christine wanted to listen to a programme on the wireless, Mr Cope wanted to go to sleep, and Sylvia wanted to get back to her tidy polished house where, even if Roger did make a lot of noise, no one answered him back.

In the hall, Clement tried to put on his sister’s coat, and Jeanette screamed and hit him. He screamed louder than she did and fell on the floor.

‘Overtired,’ said Aunt Josephine crisply. ‘Take them away, Roger.’

‘Boots! Champ!’ he bellowed. ‘Stow that, and get on out to the car. We’re sick of you.’

The children went out looking very small, with their hats pulled too far down on their heads. They walked far apart from each other down the garden path. Christine wanted to run after them and kiss them good-bye, but Sylvia might not like that, and the children were in no state to like it either.

Everyone kissed in the hall, and said how lovely it had been, and almost meant it. It had been like most other Sundays, and Sundays were always supposed to be lovely, with the family all together.

‘I’m going to close my eyes for five minutes,’ said Mr Cope, as Aunt Josephine waved from the door and shut it as the car drove off. ‘Don’t anyone come into the drawing-room.’

Christine said good-bye to her wireless programme and went upstairs to see how Geoffrey was.

He was hot and cross and complaining about crumbs in his bed, although he had put them there.

‘Those children are the noisiest ever,’ he said, sitting huddled in a chair while Christine made the bed. He was wrapped in an eiderdown, and with his bandage askew and two days’ growth of beard on his yellow skin he looked like riffraff saved from drowning. ‘I’d just got to sleep this afternoon when they started raising the devil in the garden.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, making a beautiful mitred corner with the sheet, and wishing that Sister Ram, who had always said her beds were the worst in the ward, could have seen it. ‘I’m afraid that was my fault. I was playing with them out there. I must remember I’ve got an invalid in the house now.’

‘Yes,’ he said, hitching the eiderdown round him like an old woman, ‘you must.’