Like some desolating childhood disappointment, she thought, this anxiety to get away when she had so longed to come here—so longed to see them, and to see Julie most of all. Because, even though Ben was her own brother, it was to Julie she felt closer; Julie she had missed more in these two years away. Given only this weekend, Lilian felt the need to precipitate confidences—“Are you happy, is this really what you want?” she had almost asked Julie last night, coming upstairs. Which was nonsense, impertinence; one couldn’t ask it, and in any case Julie would have laughed and told Ben afterward (“Whatever do you think Lilian said to me?”). Married couples always betrayed their friends that way—probably for something to say, being so much together. And Ben, indifferent, would say: “How perfectly extraordinary,” or “I’m not in the least surprised,” or “Poor old Lilian.”

Lilian’s room was in the old part of the house—seventeenth-century, Julie had said. Lilian allowed a century either way, for Julie’s imprecision and the exaggeration of the estate agent. She lay approving the uneven walls, the heavy beams of the roof, the sturdy irregularities of the window and door. The only furniture other than her bed was a new chest of drawers, a cane chair, and a small, unsteady table. On this table stood a china lamp and Poets of the Present, a frayed volume in which Thomas Hardy was heavily represented. The room—in fact, the whole house—looked bare. They needed so many things, Julie had said—practically everything—but for a while nothing more could be done; buying the house had taken every penny. On Friday, when Lilian arrived, Julie had shown her around, walking through the rooms with her hand in the crook of Lilian’s arm, separating apologetically at doorways. (All the rooms were at slightly different levels, and there was a step or two at each entrance—sometimes dropping, dangerously, beyond a closed door.) Julie’s shy, artless face, lowered so that strands of silky hair drooped on Lilian’s shoulder, had seemed tired, frail. Her sweater and skirt were aged, unheeded. Too much for her, Lilian thought, this house, and the baby, though I’m sure it’s lovely. “Lovely,” she had repeated later, in the nursery, over a mound of blue blanket. In the hallway, it was Lilian who linked their arms again.