‘What’s the matter?’ said Elizabeth, who was still standing in the doorway.

‘His battery’s flat. The car won’t start.’

Of course it wasn’t their fault, but somehow Duncan felt it was. It had happened, after all, at their house to which they had fetched him for a disgraceful purpose. He didn’t bother to soften his annoyance.

‘I’m afraid I’ll just have to borrow your car, Hugo.’

Elizabeth closed the door. ‘We don’t have a car any more. We couldn’t afford to run it. It was either keeping a car or taking the boys away from school, so we sold it.’

‘I see. Then if I might just use your phone, I’ll ring for a hire car. I’ve a mini-cab number in my wallet.’ One look at her face told him that wasn’t going to be possible either. ‘Now you’ll say you’ve had the phone cut off.’ Damn her! Damn them both!

‘We could have afforded it, of course. We just didn’t need it any more. I’m sorry, Duncan. I just don’t know what you can do. But we may as well all go and sit down where it’s warmer.’

‘I don’t want to sit down,’ Duncan almost shouted. ‘I have to get home.’ He shook off the hand she had laid on his arm and which seemed to be forcibly detaining him. ‘I must just walk to the nearest house with a phone.’

Hugo opened the door. The rain was more like a wall of water than a series of falling drops. ‘In this?’

‘Then what am I supposed to do?’ Duncan cried fretfully.

‘Stay the night,’ said Elizabeth calmly. ‘I really don’t know what you can do but stay the night.’

The bed was just what he would have expected a bed in the Crouch ménage to be, hard, narrow and cold. She had given him a hot water bottle which was an object he hadn’t set eyes on in ten years. And Hugo had lent him a pair of pyjamas. All the time this was going on he had protested that he couldn’t stay, that there must be some other way, but in the end he had yielded. Not that they had been welcoming. They had treated the whole thing rather as if – well, how had they treated it? Duncan lay in the dark, clutching the bottle between his knees, and tried to assess just what their attitude had been. Fatalistic, he thought, that was it. They had behaved as if this were inevitable, that there was no escape for him and here, like it or not, he must stay.

Escape was a ridiculous word, of course, but it was the sort of word you used when you were trapped somewhere for a whole night in the home of people who were obviously antagonistic, if not hostile. Why had he been such a fool as to leave those car lights on? He couldn’t remember that he had done and yet he must have. Nobody else would have turned them on. Why should they?