8

We drove, pretty fast, into the market square. ‘Tell me where, Dave,’ Mark said.

‘Oh, anywhere here, sir,’ I said, and glanced up at my bedroom window on the top floor. On the pavement outside, some children were staring through the much bigger window of Harding’s below, at the wirelesses and gramophones and three blank-faced television sets.

‘My compliments to your mother,’ Mark said as I climbed out of the car. I thought I should really invite him in to meet Mum, but I sensed from his pleasant fixed smile that he was keen to get on. When I turned at the front door the DS had already slipped off down the long slope of the square; a couple of men outside the Bull turned and stared at it, and as it swung round the corner into London Street it was traced for a vanishing second in Morleys’ window, red lost in grey. Watched by the other children, I searched for my key and let myself in; then stood quite still with my bag in the narrow hall, where the light of the outside world came in only obliquely, through the square pane of glass above the door.

The first thing I heard as I came up the stairs was the sharp squeaks and moans of the ironing board under pressure, and the hiss of steam. Through the dining-room door I saw Mavis, in her housecoat, pressing a skirt, running the nose of the iron in under each narrow pleat in sequence, and then across the top of it. ‘You’re back then,’ she said. There was a smell of fresh hot cotton and stale sweat. ‘Your mother’s with a customer.’ I went on, past the nearly closed door of the sitting room where Mum (on her knees, no doubt, with pins in her mouth) was murmuring and another woman grunting and laughing, and upstairs again to my room and closed the door. I dropped my bag on the bed and stared round at my things as if I was a guest here too – the rag rug, the shiny blue eiderdown, the pagoda repeating in diagonals up the wall, the map of Middle-earth and the more detailed one of Mordor and Gondor taped up above the desk: everything small and clear. Then in four or five seconds these facts of the room lost their strangeness, and I opened my bag and took out my books and my shoes and my bundled-up mud-stained and blood-stained clothes.

At lunch Mum went on about her new customer, Mrs Croft: ‘From Hertfordshire originally. A very stylish woman, and with quite a sense of humour.’

Mavis had an advantage in gossip about her. ‘I’ve lived in this town all my life,’ she said. ‘She lives in Marlborough Close, or used to.’

‘Crackanthorpe Lodge,’ said Mum, la-di-dah. ‘And what do you know about Mr Croft?’

‘I don’t know that there is one,’ said Mavis, and looked down with a frown at her soup, in which she had floated three or four bits of bread.

‘Esme Croft,’ said Mum, sailing on.

‘Esme ’at on straight?’ said Mavis, with a cackle.

Mum half smiled at this and turned to me. ‘Did Mrs Hadlow feed you well, dear?’

‘Yes, thanks, Mum, she did,’ I said, and then, with a dull sense of boasting, ‘though there’s a cook, too, in fact.’

‘Oh, is there indeed . . .’

‘Mrs Over,’ I said.

‘Good God, Audrey Over,’ said Mavis. ‘I knew her in the War.’

‘You certainly ought to eat well on a farm,’ Mum said.

‘What’s the set-up there, these days?’ said Mavis. ‘These posh friends of yours don’t live there, do they?’

‘No, no, Mr Hadlow’s a very important businessman. They live in London – though actually,’ I went on, ‘he does a lot of his business in France.’ I held back the fact that Mark was half-French himself. ‘They just stay at Woolpeck sometimes in the holidays. It’s Mr Pollitt’s farm.’

‘He’s a bachelor, of course, Pete Pollitt,’ said Mavis.

‘Hence the need for Mrs Over, no doubt,’ said Mum.

‘Mrs Hadlow’s Mr Pollitt’s sister,’ I said. ‘Their uncle George lives there too.’

‘Is he a bachelor too? Or a widower, perhaps . . .’

This was beyond me, and even Mavis shook her head. ‘He’s writing a history of Berkshire,’ I said.

‘They’re all a bit odd, the Pollitts,’ said Mavis.

‘He’s nice,’ I said. I wanted to tell them about my interesting discussion on the First World War up in Uncle George’s room, and my triumph at Plutocracy, and rehearsing Agamemnon with a famous French actress, and I wanted even more to keep these things to myself, unbruised by anything Mavis, or even Mum, might find to say.

I met Esme Croft myself a week later. She came in for the suit she’d had made, and she was ‘closeted’ with Mum for the final fitting. My French book was in the sitting room, but I wasn’t let in while the women’s business was going on. Again I heard muffled laughter, and then bits of louder, relieved-sounding talk that suggested the business was nearly over. The door was plucked open and Mum came out and went past me to the kitchen. Almost under her breath she said, ‘Mrs Croft’s going to have a cup of tea.’

I didn’t know if Mrs Croft was decent, and I waited for a minute once the tray had been carried through before I went into the room. Mum was standing beside her at the big sash window, looking down into the square, Mrs Croft taller and stouter than her, with wavy brown hair kept short and the hasp of her pearls on the bare white gap between collar and perm. She was laughing, in a mild, mocking way. The view outside, of the square and the raised market hall, the bus stop, the butchers’ and the chemists’, the Crown and the Bull, and the day-long coming and going of people and cars and vans, was a routine part of our lives; but to Mrs Croft it seemed the angle and the interest were all new. She held her cup and saucer in one hand as she followed someone on the pavement opposite. ‘Poor thing, she doesn’t know what she’s doing . . . now she’s going back again . . . oh dear! Women look so foolish, sometimes, and lost, don’t you think?’

I slipped in behind them to pick up my book from the chair where I always sat, across the fireplace from Mum’s. Mrs Croft must have heard, she turned and saw me, raised her chin, and said, ‘Ah . . .!’, as if detecting a small problem and knowing almost at once how to deal with it. Mum turned too, and said, ‘Oh, Mrs Croft, this is my son David.’

Mrs Croft smiled narrowly, as if suspecting a joke. I said hello, and we shook hands. ‘So what have you got there?’ she said. I gave her Le Grand Meaulnes, which she held at arm’s length for a moment and then passed back to me.

‘I expect it’s your prep, isn’t it?’ Mum said. ‘David’s in his first year at Bampton School.’ Our unspoken tactic was to assume that any person thrown by my appearance was puzzled by something else, and to solve that other puzzle for them; there was nothing they could say then. Mrs Croft’s tack was rather original.

‘He has a lot of his mother in him,’ she said warmly.

‘Mm, I think so,’ said Mum.

‘Your mother’s very much in my good books,’ Mrs Croft said.

‘Well, thank you,’ said Mum.

‘No, no, Mrs Win, I had no idea we had a dressmaker of your calibre in our dreary little town.’

Mum coloured slightly, and said, ‘Oh, it’s not such a bad place, is it?’

Mrs Croft looked at her then, with an air of humorous calculation. ‘Mm? Well, maybe you’re right, my dear,’ she said.

We hardly had friends in the town, and seemed not to feel the lack. Mrs Wiley, at Stimpson’s, had snubbed Mum more than once – I knew that, and that some of the other parents at Bishop Alfred’s had avoided her, looked down or crossed the road, in the early days at least. For a while I’d walked home after school with Sally Pike, who wanted to marry me, but Mrs Pike was strongly against the idea, and frosty to Mum when she came to collect me after tea. ‘David has been a popular and much-valued member of his year,’ Miss Bird said, in her final report, ‘and I know he will thrive in the bigger pond of Bampton School. We all wish him well!’ I can still see Mum reading this proudly, then searching in her sleeve for a handkerchief and leaving the room.

All that first year at Bampton, when I pictured Mum she was at home in the flat, I saw her over and over, her face out of focus but her actions familiar and clear as she sewed by the fire, steered a hem through the sewing machine or fetched out the two hot round tins of a chocolate sponge from the oven. At midday she still had Mavis to feed, and we both knew the sense of relief about five, the sigh and the firm smile, when the boom of Mavis slamming the front door behind her echoed back up the stairs. I didn’t think much about Mum’s evenings, the hundreds of suppers that by now she had sat down to eat alone.

In the holidays she was still working, and our evenings were the time we had together. Even then she might be hand-stitching as she sat across from me, or in the next room with the sewing machine, set up semi-permanently on the dining table. But mainly I see her by the fire, head tilted over her work under the bright lamp, and now and then catching my eye when she tied off a thread or looked round for her needle-case or scissors. I see her dark hair and high forehead but still not really her face, more familiar to me than anyone’s; and I see her hands, as familiar, too, in their way, strong, broad-knuckled and nervously revealing.

The teak sewing box was open beside her, plump pads of velvet bristling with pins, the upper layer a tray that lifted out to reveal a store of coloured threads on spools and cards beneath. The box was one of the few things she’d brought back from Burma, and the sharp far-off odour when you lifted the lid was air from Burma stored and never fading. On the outside the lid was inlaid with two black elephants flanking a palm tree, and the sides were scored with geometrical patterns. Years ago Mum had seen twenty elephants together being washed in a river, with a boy on each one sitting up behind its ears. I longed to see that myself, and to be one of the boys.

The other Burmese treasures were clothes that you made as you put them on, lengths of bright cloth laid up in the chest of drawers, but on special occasions unfolded and furled round her, the skirt called a longyi, and the six-foot-long gaung-baung wrapped round her head clockwise, with the end jutting out like a tongue or a drooping petal. Unlike English clothes, these were worn in Burma by both men and women – once or twice Mum fixed me up in the gaung-baung and sat me at her dressing table, me in love with this beautiful self, like a brother, in the mirror, Mum tensely admiring me too for a minute, and then quickly undoing it.

Apart from that there were two white cotton hand-towels with GOOD MORNING worked into them in red, a gold bracelet, a couple of large rings and a necklace – ‘probably worthless,’ Mum always said, ‘I’ve never had it valued’ – light-weight, eye-catching and wonderfully different from what other mothers wore. And then there was ‘A Tragic Gesture’, a colour print of a painting of a dancer, seen from the side, with her left arm extended and her hand strangely bent. The tropical purple and pink of the woman’s dress had faded pale blue in the English sun; in small sloping type just inside the mount it said, ‘From the Original Painting in Oils by Sir Gerald Kelly PRA’. When I was eight or nine Mum got tickets as a treat for me, and we drove to Oxford for an ‘Evening of Burmese Dance’ – which turned out to be not just dance but opera, with slapstick and puppets too, and a group called the hsaing-waing, drums and cymbals hit with a stick, and one shrieking oboe, playing loudly all the way through. Mum said she’d been to such evenings in Rangoon, it was like a variety show, but all the excitement I’d been feeling for weeks about going was crushed within minutes by the baffling monotony of the thing. We didn’t have the language, we couldn’t stand the hsaing-waing, Mum stared forbearingly ahead, while I sat up and slumped back in waves of fierce attention and half-insane boredom. A man called a mintha, in white make-up, high headdress, huge earrings and necklace, came on time and again to keep the thing going just when we thought it must be the interval, and a chance to escape. The women who were dancing swivelled and kicked back the thick trains of their dresses, signalled love and despair with arms angled or flowing, and on and off through my yawns I looked out for a Tragic Gesture – the stretched arm, and the hand, palm down, fingers flexed, the gold-ringed thumb turned fatally floorwards.

By the last week of the spring holidays it was light until nine, and I could perch in the window seat watching men passing and chatting below, while Mum was bent over her sewing and absorbed in her own feelings. ‘I never have liked the spring,’ she said. ‘It’s never agreed with me, I don’t know why.’ There were noises in the square, car doors, conversations rising and falling just within earshot as I worked on my translation of set passages from Le Grand Meaulnes: ‘We left the country nearly fifteen years ago / It will soon be fifteen years since we left the country / since we left the area, and we will certainly never come back there / we will never go back there.’ The difference between to go back and to come back hung somewhere beyond me as the late sun broke through down the length of the square, burned like a cool spotlight on the slate roof of the market hall, the white-lettered panels of the war memorial in the arcade beneath, where three or four boys sat smoking and waiting for the Swindon bus. I longed to be down there, looking at them as we strolled by in the fading warmth of the streets. ‘Well, we’d better get out,’ Mum said tersely, ‘before it’s too late,’ and put down her things and stood up, in an obscure effort of self-control. And so for me the sudden getting-ready, jacket and change of shoes and going downstairs, was shot through with the awkwardness, close to guilt, of having a favour performed for me.

‘Now, which way?’ she said briskly, once she’d slammed the door. I thought of Uncle George, with his three walks, exactly timed. We had nine or ten, a dozen, spreading out from the ends of the four main roads from the square in branches and loops, the church path, the goods station, the reservoir with its bench in a shelter, where there might be boys playing a transistor radio or a courting couple who carried on snogging as we turned our backs and stared for a stilted ten seconds at the view across the Vale. On our side you were out of the town in five minutes and onto farm tracks, and soon after that, if you turned towards the sunset, onto paths through hazel woods that by now were green overhead and all around, the floor of the wood greening densely too with spring saplings and young nettles; sometimes voices heard, figures half-seen through the fresh undergrowth, a man and a girl on the path ahead, separating for a moment as they came towards us, her arm round his waist again and stifled laughter when I glanced back.

Tonight Mum decided on Ansell’s Farm, which meant a longer march up through the town. We stopped as usual outside the Regal, where I looked sternly at the stills of Alan Bates in A Kind of Loving while Mum inspected those for the forthcoming feature displayed on the other side: Flower Drum Song, starring Nancy Kwan. ‘I believe that’s meant to be very delightful,’ she said. ‘We might even go and see that.’ Together we peered at the small colour picture of Nancy Kwan, with a tense swimming feeling of a subject being almost touched on. She was described in the caption as ‘That Petite Delightful Ball of Fire’. ‘Is she Chinese?’ I said. ‘English mother, I think I read,’ said Mum. Just then the doors opened and the audience for A Kind of Loving came out, not a lot of them, several men by themselves, young couples still taking it in, and I looked at their faces for a clue about what they’d just been through, that the black-and-white photos obviously couldn’t show. Just after the others Mr Rodgerson came out with his face almost hidden in his wife’s fur collar as he nibbled at her neck and squeezed her waist while no one was looking. Then he spotted me, and a second after, making sense of me, saw Mum, gave us an uncertain and pitying look before nodding sharply and steering Mrs Rodgerson off across the street – she said something to him and looked back over her shoulder. ‘I don’t know why they have to run X films in the school holidays,’ Mum said, as we walked on – past Jennifer’s Pantry, and the two glass-eyed petrol-pumps in Lynalls’ forecourt, and a little further on Bishop Alfred’s, where we slowed our pace to acknowledge the recent past, the silent playground, the large clean windows of the upstairs classrooms reflecting the late sun.

We crossed the main road at the top and climbed the gate into the footpath through Ansell’s Farm. ‘It’s a public right of way,’ we usually said, as if expecting a challenge. The path, sown over and tramped flat again each year, cut the corner off a field on its way to a gap in the hedge and a stile into the next field. The tender green growth was shoe-high each side of us, barley or wheat, it was too soon to tell, though by now I remembered this field and the next one in August, in the weeks before harvest, when the wheat came up to my chest and jostled where it stood under sudden gusts of wind. Mum talked cautiously about the summer term, four days away, and the cricket whites she had made me, to save money – ‘I hope they’ll be all right,’ she said. ‘They’re perfect, Mum,’ I said, and they were beautiful, they fitted me, unlike the uniform blazer, bought to grow into, and I couldn’t admit to my worry that the light sheeny flannel was too fine and showy for school. Though perhaps, when you stood out already, it did no harm to stand out some more – I wasn’t sure about this. In the next field we saw there was a woman by herself approaching on the narrow path, and a strange social pressure seemed to pause our talk and stiffen our faces as we readied ourselves to smile and say hello. I didn’t think I knew her, a lady as old as Miss Bird but much thinner, in a headscarf and belted brown mac. There was something in Mum’s face, when I peeped at her, that I knew already and was almost embarrassed by, a shutting-up, a pinching of the mouth. The woman herself looked astonished by my smile as I stood aside for her – it was as if I’d made a joke at her expense, and when Mum said ‘Good evening,’ she gasped, very quietly, took two or three steps herself off the path as she skirted us, with a frosty nod that acknowledged and dismissed the courtesy at the same time. ‘Old trout, Mum,’ I said as we carried on, and for the first time ever I took her arm – my heart was thumping at the insult to both of us, and also at my pained attempt to feel the insult as Mum felt it, her own hurt quickly concealed to protect me.

At the lane beyond the next field, we turned back towards the edge of the town. The air here was creamy and bitter with the hawthorn, white along the hedgerows. ‘That smell,’ said Mum, and shuddered, and I felt that the smell that she hated was mixed up now with the sting of the memory of the woman on the path. ‘Oh, I love it,’ I said, and thought of myself this time next week, already in bed, the sun still bright through the unlined curtains of the dorm.

Soon we came up to the council houses, where Mavis lived, in the last of the red-brick semis staring out towards the Downs; then some bigger houses, Dr Grahame’s with his old grey Rover 90 in the drive, the entrances, dusty or tarmacked, different moods of the fences and glimpses of gardens, half-remembered interest of a garage or fishpond, and a secret knowledge, more Mum’s than mine, but shared now and then, of women she’d made clothes for, who lived in certain houses that we passed. In bedrooms there, vacated, as we walked along, by the last touch of the sun, dresses and blouses by Avril Win hung waiting in wardrobes, or lay perhaps where they’d been thrown on a chair. At the junction with the main road she said, ‘Go a bit further?’ and turned right, and I fell in with her, not sure what she had in mind; we went single-file because of the traffic, with a sense of talk deferred.

Soon a narrow footpath led off to the left between tall larch-lap fences, and we emerged at the end into the turning-space of a gloomy cul-de-sac. ‘I thought there was a way through,’ Mum said; I had no idea, for a minute, where we were. The houses here were newish, large, and set back, one with lions on the gateposts, the outside verges mown. There was a feeling their owners had paid a lot of money not to be looked at, and even between the houses there were tall thick hedges. Mum sauntered along with an odd half-anxious, half-mischievous expression, not finding quite what she wanted – she stopped, just for a moment, before the last house but one on the right. The front gate was open onto the wide gravel sweep, and the empty garage with its open doors made me tense with a feeling that whoever lived there was about to come back and catch us looking. It was a large plain red-brick house with white metal windows and a porch with white pillars, and a view through at the side to a lawn closed off by a tall hedge of fir-trees. I deciphered the wrought-iron name on the wrought-iron gate: Crackanthorpe Lodge.

‘Oh . . .’ I said. ‘Oh, it’s Mrs . . . um . . .’

‘I was just curious,’ Mum said.

When we got in I made cocoa, and Mum worked late, with a frock to finish for a girl’s birthday party – Mandy Wiseman, who’d been at Bishop Alfred’s the year above me. ‘She’s a big lass,’ Mum said, checking again that the measurements were right. ‘She always was,’ I said. Mandy’s famous bosom felt awkwardly present in the twinned satin cups that jumped in Mum’s lap as she sewed a crimson flower to the shoulder. She held it up to see how it hung. ‘Time was,’ she said, ‘you’d have tried this on for me.’

‘But not now, Mum . . .’ and my weary smile at that childhood self couldn’t quite keep a blush from coming through. ‘That was a long time ago!’

‘Do you remember at Auntie Susan’s?’ Mum said, so that I could see where she was going, but not yet how far.

‘Oh, Mum . . .’ I said.

‘The moment we got to the house you were off upstairs, you knew exactly where she kept those black velvet evening shoes.’

‘Well, she’s got tiny feet,’ I said, ‘only size three.’

‘The sight of you when you came clattering down again, in that red skirt of hers, which on you of course came down to the ground.’ Mum’s faint smile, as she shifted and shook out Mandy’s frock, was mainly nostalgic, but the batting of her eyelashes seemed to fend off some reawoken annoyance, or shame. ‘Ah, you were a dear little boy.’

‘Thanks very much,’ I said, and stuck out my tongue at her. It seemed she wasn’t going to repeat what Uncle Brian had said, in his stony unamusement at the sight of his six-year-old nephew in his wife’s best clothes: Ruddy hell, Avril, we’re not in flaming Rangoon now.

‘It’s no good dwelling on the past’, was Mum’s firm position, often stated. But just sometimes on those evenings the atmosphere yielded – there was a brief fireside lapse into reminiscence. Her memories of Rangoon were generally things I’d heard about before, the elephants, the Governor’s limousine, the Burmese women smoking huge cigars, but sometimes she said something new, which in turn gave me a sense of further matters she was holding back; and sometimes, very rarely, she would mention my father, in a quite straightforward way, as if we talked about him all the time. When I won the Hadlow Exhibition, she said, ‘Well, you take after your father, of course, he was a clever man.’

‘Oh, was he?’ I said.

‘I don’t know what he saw in me.’

‘You’re clever too, Mum,’ I said, and meant it, and saw that I partly meant she was clever at keeping things to herself.

‘He knew all about politics, the whole situation in the country after the War, which I really didn’t understand very well – well, I didn’t have to, I was just a humble typist!’

‘You must have learned about it, though,’ I said.

‘I had my list of all the frequently used names, the Burmese officials and politicians, pinned up by my desk, to make sure I spelled them right. I suppose I picked up a bit about who was who from Sir Hubert, you know, and Lady Rance was also completely on top of it, she had to be, because of entertaining people all the time, and knowing how to address them. Burmese names can be very confusing.’

I smiled almost anxiously at Mum in the circle of light and felt perhaps I could press her, ask some easy and general question and this time get a more detailed answer than ‘I wish there was more I could tell you, my love.’

The one thing we both had for sure on my father was the photograph, framed but kept in the drawer of Mum’s dressing table, beneath handkerchiefs and scarves. I got it out secretly sometimes when she wasn’t home. An unsmiling young man, dark-skinned, a sheen on his round spectacles: unknowable, but looking just a little like me in the mirror of the silent bedroom. Then on rare occasions he would be downstairs in the sitting room, beside a small vase of freesias or carnations. Then he was gone again – I see now that he slid to and fro between being useful and unmentionable. Some of Mum’s regular customers expressed an interest in her story and were touched to be shown her husband’s image; most found the whole subject too difficult, there was no need at all to go into it, and they took their lead from her own fierce discretion.

‘I need to take some samples up to Mrs Croft,’ Mum said two days after the fitting.

‘OK,’ I said – the visit as I saw it had the drabness of all adult social life then, of things gone through because you more or less had to, with eager politeness and a rolling prickle of boredom. ‘Are we going in the car?’

‘You might as well stay here, love. Get on with your translations!’

Now that I was being let off I felt I was missing something with an unexplained interest. ‘I don’t mind,’ I said, meaning I didn’t mind going with her, but I let the wheel settle where it would.

‘Esme Croft has got it into her head that I’d like to make her some loose covers.’

‘Oh Mum, you hate doing loose covers.’

‘It will be exceedingly boring . . .’ – she pursed her lips. ‘But I’ll make her pay.’

‘Good,’ I said. ‘Is she quite rich?’

‘I get that feeling . . . don’t you?’ She looked at me. ‘Do you like her?’

I shrugged, and then grinned. I only had our two minutes’ talk to go on, something physical and emphatic about her. ‘She’s all right,’ I said.

‘Mm, hard to know yet, isn’t it? I’ll just go and change.’

‘You look fine, Mum.’

‘I can look a bit finer,’ she said.

I sat in the window seat, heard the bump of the front door slamming below and watched her as she walked off down the marketplace, swinging the cloth bag with the swatch-books in it – someone spoke to her but she didn’t see them, she went on smartly, with the toss of the head, half-nervous, half-resolved, that I knew so well.

When she’d been gone about ten minutes the phone rang. Or rather it made a small buzzing click, like an instantly stifled urge to ring. I went out into the hall and stood watching it for a minute; and then, very carefully, lifted the receiver. ‘Oh this keeps happening, I’m sorry, the line is busy,’ said a man’s voice. ‘Oh, sorry,’ I said. ‘Try later, will you?’ said the man – ‘we’ll be on the line for the next half-hour.’ I put my finger on the bar and after fifteen seconds, and even more carefully and slowly, lifted it again, the receiver still close to my ear. (The danger here was of my breath, or some remoter sound in the flat or even outside, a shout or car horn, being audible; but then a dry hand pressed over the black cup of the mouthpiece risked making a suspicious little noise of its own.) The other man was speaking now, ‘Well, we could do that, lovey, if you think Jill won’t mind.’ ‘We’ll get off into the woods, won’t we, most of the time. We can easily lose Jill. Then we can do what the hell we like.’ ‘Ooh, can’t wait . . . we probably shouldn’t talk about it on the phone.’ ‘It should be all right for a bit. You know I’ve found out who they are.’ ‘The Post Office don’t tell you, do they.’ ‘No, no, it’s all confidential, for obvious reasons.’ ‘I don’t know why they can’t just make more lines, if that’s what the problem is.’ ‘Anyway, it’s some trying little woman in the town who seems to be a dressmaker – a woman and her son, I think it is.’ I stood blank-faced, denying everything, as my heart raced. ‘There isn’t a husband, you mean?’ ‘He’s probably out at work – not that I’ve the remotest interest in listening in. She tends to come on after lunch, measurements and things, when I was trying to ring Desmond, actually, about our naughty weekend. That’s how I learned her name – Mrs Avril Win.’ ‘You have been snooping!’ ‘I just happened to hear it,’ said the first man, with a giggle, ‘kindly make the cheque out to Mrs Avril Win.’ ‘What a name . . .’ ‘I know . . .’ ‘So was that the son just now, do you suppose?’ ‘Yes, he’s a teenager – young teenager, Jeffrey! before you get any wicked ideas – well, you can tell, his voice sounds as though it’s just broken . . .’ ‘Give him a few years, lovey,’ said Jeffrey, I hung up – did I trigger a tinkle at the very last moment, make them freeze with suspicion? I ran upstairs to my room, pulse thumping with confusion and excitement from the guilt and the daring of listening in, as well as the things the men seemed to be saying to each other, in such cheerful and confident tones. Probably I’d seen them, down below, in the square, or at the cinema, perhaps, smoking in the dark. I heard them more than saw them in the woods where we walked, in the green thickets and the evening light, getting away from Jill.

It was nearly dark when Mum got back, and as soon as she’d taken her coat off she put on her apron. ‘Egg and chips?’ she said, briskly, but giving me a treat.

I set our places at the kitchen table, the dining room unusable. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘did you meet Mr Croft?’ I didn’t care much one way or the other, but I needed a distraction from my thoughts about the men, about Jeffrey and the other one, Lovey. I felt I’d woken up but the dream was still going on.

Mum had put on the chip pan, and the speckled grey disc of old lard grew steadily gold and translucent over the flame. She patted the thick chips dry in a tea-towel, and dropped one in – no sizzle yet – and looked sideways at me as if I’d said something wrong. Then I saw she was merely thinking how to put something probably comical in words. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I didn’t like to ask, obviously, but after five minutes she just came out with it.’

‘What did she say?’

Again she seemed to find some delicacy in the matter. ‘She said of course she had been married, but she’s not any more. I get the impression Mr Croft wasn’t altogether the marrying kind,’ and she looked at me almost shyly.

‘He made a strange mistake, then,’ I said.

‘Yes . . . or she did, I don’t know . . . Anyway, Mrs Croft says she got a divorce some years ago. I have the feeling she did pretty well out of it.’

‘And has she got any children?’

‘No, I’m sure she hasn’t,’ said Mum, with a little shake of the head.

I didn’t think I’d ever met a divorced woman, and now that it turned out I had, my initial sensation of being bored and somehow challenged by Mrs Croft seemed to find a proper focus.

‘And what’s the house like inside?’ I said.

Mum thought for a moment, tried another chip, the fat was ready. ‘Oh, it’s nice, you know – very comfortable, anyway. I can’t say I care for the material she’s chosen, but still.’

‘Which is it?’ I said. ‘Not Sunningdale?’

‘Worse,’ she said, tumbling the chips into the pan. ‘Ladies in Waiting.’

‘Oh, Mum . . .’ I said.