‘Can you imagine anyone taking such an attitude, Elizabeth, in this day and age? She literally will not have me in the house because I’ve got Oliver and I wasn’t married to Francis. Thank God I wasn’t, that’s all I can say. But wouldn’t you think that sort of thing went out with the dark ages?’

‘She’ll come round in time,’ said James’s mother.

‘Yes, but how much time? I mean, she hasn’t got that much, has she? And here am I taking shameful advantage of your hospitality. You don’t know how guilty it makes me, only I literally have nowhere else to go. And I simply cannot afford to take another flat like the last, frankly, I couldn’t raise the cash. I haven’t been getting the contracts like I used to before Oliver was born and of course I’ve never had a penny from that unspeakable, selfish, pig of a man.’

James’s mother and father would become very bored with all this but they could hardly walk out of the room. James and Rosamund could, though after a time Mirabel took to following James up to the glory-hole where she would sit on his bed and continue her long, detailed, repetitive complaints just as if he were her own contemporary.

It was a little disconcerting at first, though he got used to it. Mirabel was about thirty but to him and his sister she seemed the same age as their parents, middle-aged, old, much as anyone did who was over, say, twenty-two. And till he got accustomed to her manner he hardly knew what to make of the way she gazed intensely into his eyes or suddenly clutched him by the arm. She described herself (frequently) as passionate, nervous and highly strung.

She was a small woman and James was already taller than she. She had a small, rather pinched face with large prominent dark eyes and she wore her long hair hanging loose like Rosamund’s. The Fyfields were big-boned, fair-headed people with ruddy skins but Mirabel was dark and very thin and her wrists and hands and ankles and feet were very slender and narrow. There was, of course, no blood relationship, Mirabel being Aunt Julie’s own sister’s granddaughter.

Mirabel was not her baptismal name. She had been christened Brenda Margaret but it had to be admitted that the name she had chosen for herself suited her better, suited her feyness, her intense smiles and brooding sadnesses, and the clinging clothes she wore, the muslins and the trailing shawls. She always wore a cloak or a cape to go into the village and James’s mother said she couldn’t remember Mirabel ever having possessed a coat.

James had always had rather a sneaking liking for her, he hadn’t known why. But now that he was older and saw her daily, he understood something he had not known before. He liked Mirabel, he couldn’t help himself, because she seemed to like him so much and because she flattered him. It was funny, he could listen to her flattery and distinguish it for what it was, but this knowledge did not detract a particle from the pleasure he felt in hearing it.