The houses had been built on the site of an old mansion. There had been several such in Abelard Avenue, as well as big houses like Mrs Julian’s which were not quite mansions. Most of these had been pulled down and those which remained converted into flats. They would do that to hers when she was gone, thought Mrs Julian, those nephews and nieces and great nephews and great nieces of hers would do that. She had watched the houses opposite being built. About ten years ago it had been. She called them the paintbox houses because there was something about them that reminded her of a child’s drawing and because each had its front door painted a different colour, yellow, red, blue, lime, orange and chocolate.

‘It’s called Paragon Place,’ said Mrs Upton, her cleaner and general help, when the building was completed.

‘What a ridiculous name! Paintbox Place would be far more suitable.’

Mrs Upton ignored this as she ignored all of Avice Julian’s remarks which she regarded as ‘showing off’, affected or just plain senile. ‘They do say,’ she said, ‘that the next thing’ll be they’ll start building on that bit of waste ground next door.’

‘Waste ground?’ said Mrs Julian distantly. ‘Can you possibly mean the wood?’

‘Waste ground’ had certainly been a misnomer, though ‘wood’ was an exaggeration. It was a couple of rustic acres, more or less covered with trees of which part of one side bordered Mrs Julian’s garden, part the Great North Road, and which had its narrow frontage on Abelard Avenue. People used the path through it as a short cut from the station. At Mrs Upton’s unwelcome forebodings, Avice Julian had got up and gone to the right hand side of the bay window which overlooked the ‘wood’ and thought how disagreeable it would be to have another Paintbox Place on her back doorstep. In these days when society seemed to have gone mad, when the cost of living was frightening, when there were endless strikes and she was asked to pay 98 per cent income tax on the interest on some of her investments, it was quite possible, anything could happen.

However, no houses were built next door to Mrs Julian. It appeared that the ‘wood’, though hardly National Trust or an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, was nevertheless scheduled as ‘not for residential development’. For her lifetime, it seemed, she would look out on birch trees and green turf and small hawthorn bushes – when she was not, that is, looking out on the inhabitants of Paintbox Place, on Mr and Mrs Arnold and Mr Laindon and the Nicholsons, all young people, none of them much over forty. Their activities were of absorbing interest to Mrs Julian as she knitted away in dark blue two-ply, and a source too of disapproval and sometimes outright condemnation.

After Christmas, in the depths of the winter, when Mrs Julian was in the kitchen watching Mrs Upton peeling potatoes for lunch, Mrs Upton said: ‘You’re lucky I’m private, have you thought of that?’