‘Poor you,’ Katie said sadly. ‘What a thing to happen. She had liked Mr Gudgeon, who had been a timid, kindly man. They had seen more of him after the death of his wife, last year.

‘And now,’ Sybil said, knocking back the last of her Scotch and rallying herself, ‘as Edna so rightly predicted, I shall have to look for a new tenant.’

‘You won’t have any trouble there,’ Katie said. ‘There’ll be a queue.’

‘I know.’ Sybil grimaced, before her lined face broke into a wicked grin. ‘But will any of them be a husband for Susan?’

When Katie first moved into the household of Sybil Routh, it had taken her some time to get used to it, and to what was expected.

‘I think it’s going to be all right,’ she reported to Maudie the first week, as they had a cuppa together. ‘The room’s lovely, now I’ve got a few of my things in it, and Miss Routh is so much nicer than some of those other miserable old bitches I could have had as landladies. She even lets Michael tinkle on the piano sometimes, and it’s quite a racket. And she’s very pleased if I lend a hand, which I’m quite happy to do. Her feet look so sore for moving around much. But she is rather odd, isn’t she?’

‘I think her background was quite bohemian,’ Maudie said, frowning as she tried to remember what she’d heard about Sybil Routh. ‘At least on her mother’s side. Father was a clergyman of course, but with his own ideas to some extent, and I think her mother had come from a family of arty types. So what with the missionary input and the artistes, she’s a bit of a rum mixture.’

At first, Katie was nervous of Miss Routh. Her posh, outspoken manner was not what Katie was used to, but she quickly discovered several things that made life in the house a very good experience. The first was that while Sybil Routh was interested in what was going on in the world, and in humanity in general, she was not nosy about people in particular. She did not pry, nor did Katie find herself cross-questioned about her past or feel that her privacy was going to be invaded. But she realized, over time, that if she did tell Sybil things, she would not been shocked or judgemental – she seemed to treat people with a broad, breezy objectivity.

Secondly, the fact that she demanded that the household share their evening meal together meant that life was not lonely, that Michael got to know other adults, and that the atmosphere in the house was gently, if eccentrically, friendly. They all assembled in the evening after Sybil banged the mellow-sounding gong on the hall table. At first there had been the quiet banker Mr Treace, who over time had been replaced by various harmless young men, clerks and salesmen requiring lodgings in what was the smallest room on offer in the house. None of them really stuck in the memory. The latest was a slightly older man, Mr Jenkins, who was doing the accounts in a firm on the Soho Road. Then there were the Gudgeons. Mrs Gudgeon scarcely ever left her room, but Mr Gudgeon had taken his evening meals with them, before carrying a portion up to feed to his sickly wife. He was a faded, shy person with clicking, badly fitting dentures, but had a genuine and kindly nature. Sometimes he told them stories about his past out in Barnt Green as a boy.