She ran up to her room to get it: a colour-slide of the infant-class with Wally in the foreground, his hands dangling. She put it in the viewer and returned to the bar. The young man looked at it intently, whistling to himself. ‘Quite a thing,’ he said. ‘Quite something. Nice sharp picture, too.’

Everybody wanted to look at it. While they were handing it about, the door from the house opened and Mrs Barrimore came in.

She was a beautiful woman, very fine-drawn with an exquisite head of which the bone-structure was so delicate and the eyes so quiet in expression that the mouth seemed like a vivid accident. It was as if an artist, having started out to paint an ascetic, had changed his mind and laid down the lips of a voluptuary.

With a sort of awkward grace that suggested shyness, she moved into the bar, smiling tentatively at nobody in particular. Dr Maine looked quickly at her and stood up. The Rector gave her good-evening and the restless young man offered her a drink. Her husband, without consulting her, poured a glass of lager.

‘Hallo, Mum. We’ve all been talking about Wally’s warts,’ Patrick said.

Mrs Barrimore sat down by Miss Cost. ‘Have you?’ she said. ‘Isn’t it strange? I can’t get over it.’ Her voice was charming: light and very clear. She had the faintest hesitation in her speech and a trick of winding her fingers together. Her son brought her drink to her and she thanked the restless young man rather awkwardly for it. Jenny, who liked her very much, wondered, not for the first time, if her position at The Boy-and-Lobster was distasteful to her and exactly why she seemed so alien to it.

Her entrance brought a little silence in its wake. Dr Maine turned his glass round and round and stared at the contents. Presently Miss Cost broke out in fresh spate of enthusiasm.