‘Maybe he came – well, professionally,’ she said. ‘Didn’t you ask her?’

‘I didn’t like to, dear. You know what Pauline is.’

Marjorie did. And now they had to stop talking about it, for Pauline had come in with the tea things. She buttered a scone for Mother, cut it into small pieces, tucked a napkin round Mother’s neck, and all this she did in silence.

‘Why are you using the best china?’ Mother said.

‘What d’you mean, dear?’ said Marjorie. ‘This is the old blue china you always use.’

‘No, it isn’t.’

Marjorie started once more to protest, but Pauline interrupted her. ‘Leave it. She can’t see. You know how bad her sight is.’ She gave mother one of her bright nurse’s smiles. ‘OK, so we’re using the best china,’ she said, and she wiped the corners of Mother’s mouth with a tissue.

Not long after they had finished Marjorie left. She had the perfectly valid excuse of George and the children. It wasn’t possible for her to stay long, Mother understood that. And she had, after all, washed the dishes before she went, with Pauline’s eye on her and Pauline’s silence more difficult to bear than any noise. On Saturday afternoon she was back again, ‘just looking in’ as she put it, on her way to the shops.

‘He was here again last night,’ Mother whispered.

‘Who was?’

‘That doctor friend of Pauline’s. He was here ever so late. I rang my bell for Pauline because I wanted to go to the toilet. It was gone eleven and I could hear him talking after I’d gone back to bed.’

Pauline had been in the garden, getting the clean linen, drawsheets and towels and napkins and Mother’s nightgowns, in from the line. When she re-entered the room Marjorie studied her appearance uneasily. Her sister looked exhausted. She was a tall gaunt woman, dark and swarthy, and now she was so thin that the shapeless old trousers she wore hung loose against her hips. Dark shadows ringed her eyes, and those eyes had a glazed look, due perhaps to the drugs she had been on ever since she came out of ‘that place’.

‘Have I got a spot?’ said Pauline. ‘Or am I so lovely you can’t take your eyes off me?’

‘Sorry, I was off in a dream.’ Marjorie said she had better get away before the shops shut, and Mother thanked her for coming ‘to see an old nuisance like me’. After that one, Marjorie didn’t dare look at Pauline again. She did her shopping and went home in a troubled frame of mind, but she waited until the children had gone out before opening her heart to her husband. Seventeen-year-old Brian and sixteen-year-old Susan were apt, with the ignorance of youth, to remark when their grandmother was mentioned that Nanna was ‘a dear old love’; that they wouldn’t mind at all if she came to live with them; and that it was ‘a drag for Auntie Pauline’ never being able to go out.