There was a long counter at the far end of the tea room. It was stacked high with sandwiches, pastries, jam rolls, meringue buns, fresh fruit salad, mince pies, strudels, pancakes, flans of peach and pear, and bowls of cream, jellies, custards, and a pan of tiramisu that the architect’s wife had baked from a recipe she had been sent from her sister who was married to an Englishman and lived in Greece. The tiramisu was the jewel in the crown.

It was mayhem around the counter. Ladies coming and going, setting plates, arranging displays, settling the flowers, removing someone’s handbag. It was an extravaganza of colour and texture. A single montage of crinoline, silk and nylon in heaps of blue and cream and pastel pink where all the pretty ladies sat at the top table, beside the food counter, in their frocks of billowy bouffant, lavishly trimmed in lace, and nylon parchment underskirts with ribbon rushing, and soft nylon tricot bodices with more lace trimming, inside swanky jackets with big lapels and giant buttons, and the daring Mrs Edmonton in her black trouser suit, and the older ladies in dark black silk, and crimson red shawls, with chunky chains of gold hanging around their necks.

Birdie was adorned in white mohair wool, with a little tiara of white feathers, like a small child at her First Holy Communion. She was nervous and shy. She had brought an offering of little coconut cakes and simple buns made with egg and flour and a tiny bit of jam in the centre of each. Tiramisu was overdoing it a bit, Birdie thought. And the architect’s wife looked like a baked cadaver after wasting all that money on a holiday with her sister.

Birdie had no one to talk with, so she clung to Betty Burke and her cronies at the top table, which wasn’t so comfortable after their recent exchange of fire. The ladies were busy hiding away the best tarts and pastries in the kitchen, or at the back of the display, so that when the night was over they could slip the stash into the boots of their cars and feast on them with their families for the rest of the week.

Betty Burke’s gang was known as ‘the top brass’. Women with good heels and old money. From landed families who paid the piper long before the foundations had been dug for the little galvanized pavilion that constituted the new golf club in 1934. Convent girls reared only to provide homes for the small coterie of professional men in the town. Ladies who ran the town by shaping opinion, telling the priests what to say and what to do, and by sticking together like glue at social gatherings.

Standing before that battalion of style in the tea room, and holding her little coconut cakes on a wicker tray, Birdie wished that Alex was beside her. He was the man who could chat to the ladies. And she could talk to him. In fact he was the only one she really did talk to since her wedding day. The only person she opened her heart to. But she was alone in the crowd for almost an hour.