So many of these books held no interest for him any longer. They were kids’ stuff. He began stacking them in a ‘wanted’ and an ‘unwanted’ pile on the floor. Palmerston sat on the window sill and watched him, unblinking golden eyes in a big round grey face. It was a good thing, James thought, that he had ceased keeping mice before Palmerston arrived. Perhaps the mouse cage could be sold. There was someone in his class at school who kept hamsters and had been talking of getting an extra cage. It wouldn’t do any harm to give him a ring.

James went down to the living room and picked up the receiver to dial Timothy Gordon’s number; the phone was dead. There was no dialling tone but a silence broken by occasional faint clicks and crepitations. He would have to go up the lane to the call box and phone the engineers, but not now, later. It was pouring with rain.

As he was crossing the hall and was almost at the foot of the stairs the doorbell rang. His mother had said something about the laundry coming. James opened the door absent-mindedly, prepared to nod to the man and take in the laundry box, and saw instead Mirabel.

Her car was parked on the drive and staring out of its front window was Oliver, chewing something, his fingers plastering the glass with stickiness. Mirabel was dressed up to the nines, as Aunt Julie might have said, and dressed very unsuitably for the weather in a trailing, cream-coloured pleated affair with beads round her neck and two or three chiffon scarves and pale pink stockings and cream shoes that were all straps no thicker than bits of string.

‘Oh, James, you are going to be an angel, aren’t you, and have Oliver for me just for the afternoon? You won’t be on your own, Rosamund’s in, I saw her looking out of her bedroom window. I did try to ring you but your phone’s out of order.’

Mirabel said this in an accusing tone as if James had purposely broken the phone himself. She was rather breathless and seemed in a hurry.

‘Why can’t you take him with you?’ said James.

‘Because, if you must know, Gilbert is going to buy me something rather special and important and I can’t take a baby along.’

Rosamund, under the impression that excitement was afoot, appeared at the bend in the staircase.

‘It’s only Mirabel,’ said James.

But Mirabel took the opportunity, while his attention was distracted, of rushing to the car – her finery getting much spotted with rain in the process – and seizing the sticky Oliver.

‘You’d like to stay with James and Rosamund, wouldn’t you, sweetheart?’

‘Do we have to?’ said Rosamund, coming downstairs and bestowing on Oliver a look of such unmistakable distaste that even Mirabel flinched. Flinched but didn’t give up. Indeed, she thrust Oliver at James, keeping his sticky mouth well clear of her dress, and James had no choice but to grab hold of him. Oliver immediately started to whine and hold out his arms to his mother.