‘Pauline’s got a boy friend, George.’

‘You’re joking.’

‘No, I’m not. He’s a doctor she met when she was in that Hightrees place, and he’s called round twice in the evenings and stopped ever so late. Mother told me.’

‘Well, good old Pauline,’ said George. ‘She’s forty if she’s a day.’

‘She’s forty-two,’ said Marjorie. ‘You know very well she’s seven years younger than I am.’

‘Doesn’t look it though, does she? People always take you for the younger one.’ George smiled affectionately at his wife and took up the evening paper.

‘You’re to listen to me, George. Don’t read that now. I haven’t finished. George, suppose – suppose she was to get married?’ The words came out in a breathless, almost hysterical rush. ‘Suppose she was to marry this doctor?’

‘What, old Pauline?’

‘Well, why not? I know she’s not young and she’s nothing to look at, but when you think of the women who do get married . . . I mean, looks don’t seem to have much to do with it. I don’t care what these young people say nowadays, all women want to get married. So why not Pauline?’

‘A man’s got to want to marry them.’

‘Yes, but look at it this way. He’s a doctor, and Pauline always wanted to be a doctor, only Mother wouldn’t have it so she had to settle for nursing instead. And she’s got a masculine sort of mind. She can talk way above my head when she wants. They might have a lot in common.’

‘Good luck to her then, is what I say. She’s never so much as been out with a man all the time I’ve known her, and if she can get herself one now and get married – well, like I said, the best of luck.’

‘But, George, don’t you see? What about Mother? A doctor’s bound to have a practice and be overworked and everything. He wouldn’t want Mother. You don’t know how awful Mother is. She gets Pauline up five or six times some nights. She rings that bell by her bedside for the least little thing. And when she’s up she keeps Pauline on the trot, wanting her glasses or her knitting or her pills. Pauline never complains but sometimes I reckon she’d do anything to get away. I know I shouldn’t say it, and yet I wonder if she didn’t stage that breakdown when Mother had her first stroke in the hope she’d never have to go back and . . .’

‘Aren’t you getting steamed up about nothing?’ George said placidly. ‘As far as we know, the bloke’s only been there twice and maybe he’ll never go there again.’

But this was the major worry of Marjorie’s life: that the time might come when Mother would have to live with her. She hardly understood how she had managed to escape it so long. From the onset of Mother’s illness, she had been the obvious person to care for her. For one thing, she was and always had been Mother’s favourite daughter. Pauline was to have been a boy. Even now Marjorie could remember, as a child of seven, Mother saying to her friends, ‘I’m carrying forward, so it’ll be a boy this time.’ Paul. The name was ready, the blue baby clothes. Mother had never really got over having a second daughter. There had been, Marjorie recalled, some neglect, some degree of cruelty. Scathing words for Pauline when she wanted to take up medicine, cruel words when she had never married. Marjorie had quite a big house, big enough for Mother to have a bedsitting room of her own; she had no job; her children fended for themselves. How lucky it was for her Pauline hadn’t been Paul, for no man would have given up his job, his flat, his whole way of life, to care for an unloved, unloving mother . . .