When he finished directions and she hung up, the thud of the receiver was like a sharp rebuke, as though she meant that he should no longer concern himself about the matter. It was as though she’d actually tacked such a message on to everything else she’d said, that he should mind his own business, but he went back across the alley all the same.

Angie hadn’t moved, but the rag doll had fallen to the floor. Seymour picked it up and tucked it back into her arms, feeling foolish, but not knowing what else to do. He cleared a chair and sat next to the bed and waited, and it was a very long time before he heard footsteps outside. He leaped up to open the door, but Lynne gazed at him with such unfriendliness that he felt he’d done something horribly uncouth and wrong in summoning her at all. She went straight past him to the bed and stood looking down, but nothing in her face mirrored his own concern.

She bent to shake Angie by the shoulder. ‘Wake up and tell me what the trouble is,’ she said. ‘No, don’t you dare go back to sleep, I didn’t come all this way and miss my lesson just to…Oh, it’s hopeless, the same old story, and I can’t do anything for her. You don’t have to look like that, she’s not unconscious, she’s…I’ll just have to ring Dad at work. Oh, this place, it’s such a pig sty, you couldn’t bring a doctor in here without cringing from embarrassment.’

‘You can use our phone if you like,’ Seymour said, shrinking from the distaste in Lynne’s eyes, as ashamed of the untidy room as though he were somehow responsible. ‘I live just over the alley.’

Lynne nodded ungraciously and followed him across to the green gate and he suffered more embarrassment explaining that it was kept locked and she’d have to climb over. In those smart, freshly laundered clothes, she wasn’t really the sort of person you could expect to scramble over a gate. There was no softness about her, apparently no kindness at all. He pitied Angie for having such an uncaring sister and as he led the way to the phone, he tried to convey by his stiff back the way he felt.