‘She’s got a house.’

‘Houses can be sold, you silly boy. You don’t suppose Madam Mirabel will live here, do you?’ Mirabel must have heard that, James thought, as the door opened and the tea trolley appeared, but there was no warning Aunt Julie or catching her eye. ‘I could make another will yet, I could bring myself to it. They say it’s a woman’s privilege to change her mind.’

Mirabel looked cross and there was very little chance of conversation after that as Oliver, when he was being fed or bathed or played with, dominated everything. He was a big child with reddish hair, not in the least like Mirabel but resembling, presumably, the mean and heartless Francis. He was now ten months old and walking, ‘into everything’, as James’s mother put it, and it was obvious that he tired Aunt Julie whose expression became quite distressed when screams followed Mirabel’s refusal to give him chocolate cake. Oliver’s face and hands were wiped clean and he was put on the floor where he tried to eat pieces of coal out of the scuttle and, when prevented, set about tormenting the cat. James got up to go and Aunt Julie clutched his hand as he passed her, whispering with a meaning look that virtue was its own reward.

It was not long before he discovered who the ‘someone else we both know’ was. Aunt Julie wrote a letter to James’s parents in which she told them she was leaving a sum of money to Rosamund in her will. Elizabeth Fyfield said she thought there was something very unpleasant about this letter and that it seemed to imply Rosamund had gone to Sindon Lodge with ‘great expectations’ in mind. She was upset by it but Rosamund was jubilant. Aunt Julie had not said what the sum was but Rosamund was sure it must be thousands and thousands of pounds – half a million was the highest figure she mentioned – and with her birthday money (she was eleven on 1 March) she bought herself a book of photographs of London architecture, mostly of streets in Mayfair, Belgravia and Knightsbridge, so that she could decide which one to have her flat in.

‘I think we made a great mistake in telling her,’ said James’s father.

For Rosamund had taken to paying weekly visits to Sindon Lodge. She seldom went without some small gift for Aunt Julie, a bunch of snowdrops, a lop-sided pot she had made at school, a packet of peppermints.

‘Wills can be changed, you know,’ said James.

‘That’s not why I go. Don’t you dare say that! I go because I love her. You’re just jealous of me and you haven’t been for weeks and weeks.’

It was true. He saw that Rosamund had indeed been corrupted and he, put to the test, had failed it. Yet it was not entirely disillusionment or pique which kept him from Sindon Lodge but rather a feeling that it must be wrong to manipulate people in this way. He had sometimes heard his father use the expression ‘playing God’ and now he understood what it meant. Aunt Julie had played God with him and with Rosamund and with Mirabel too. Probably she was still doing it, hinting at will-changing each time Mirabel displeased her. So he would go there to defy this manipulating, not to be a puppet moved by her strings, he would go on the following day on his way home from school.