‘So I am,’ she muttered, ‘the other’s just a sort of a joke—my husband—’ her voice died away. She was now extremely conscious of Mr Bard’s scrutiny and particularly aware of its dwelling speculatively on the veteran paintbox at her feet. All he said, however, was, ‘Dear me,’ in a donnish tone. When she looked her apprehension he tipped her a wink. This was disconcerting.

She was relieved by the arrival on an apocalyptic motorbicycle of a young man and his girl. The noonday sun pricked at their metal studs and turned the surface of their leather suits and calf-high boots into toffee. From under crash helmets, hair, veiled in oil and dust, fell unevenly to their shoulders. Their machine belched past the stationary chauffeur-driven car and came to a halt. They put their booted feet to the ground and lounged, chewing, against their bicycle. ‘There is nothing,’ Troy thought, ‘as insolent as a gum-chewing face,’ and at the same time she itched to make a sharp, black drawing of the riders.

‘Do you suppose—?’ she ventured in a low voice.

‘I hardly think water-wandering would present a very alluring prospect,’ Mr Bard rejoined.

‘In any case, they have no luggage.’

‘They may not need any. They may bed down as they are.’

‘Oh, do you think so? All those steel knobs.’

‘There is that, of course,’ Mr Bard agreed.

The young people lit cigarettes, inhaled deeply, stared at nothing and exhaled vapour. They had not spoken.

Miss Rickerby-Carrick gazed raptly at them and then wrote in her book.

‘—“two of our Young Independents”,’ she noted. ‘Is it to gladiators that one should compare them? Would they like it if one did? Would I be able to get on with them? Would they like me? Would they find me sympatica or is it sympatico? Alas, there I go again. Incorrigible, hopeless old Me!’

She stabbed down an ejaculation mark, clicked off her pencil with an air of quizzical finality, and said to Troy: ‘How did you get here? I came by bus: from good old Brummers.’

‘I drove,’ Mr Bard said. ‘From London and put up at a pub. Got here last night.’

‘I did too,’ said Troy. ‘But I came by train.’

‘There’s a London train that connects this morning,’ Miss Rickerby-Carrick observed. ‘Arrives 11.45.’

‘I know. But I—there was—I had an engagement,’ Troy mumbled.

‘Such as going to the pictures?’ Mr Bard airily suggested to nobody in particular. ‘Something of that sort?’ Troy looked at him but he was staring absently at the river. ‘I went to the pictures,’ he said. ‘But not last night. This morning. Lovely.’

‘The pictures!’ Miss Rickerby-Carrick exclaimed. ‘This morning! Do you mean the cinema?’

But before Mr Bard could explain himself if indeed he intended to do so, two taxis, one after the other, came down the cobbled lane and discharged their passengers.