This announcement filled him with dismay. He lost his head and implored her to wait until he had seen the doctor. ‘You see,’ he told Alleyn, ‘I knew so well what would happen. Ursy, of course, doesn’t agree with me but the truth is that for her Flossie was a purely symbolic figure. You’ve heard what Flossie did for Ursy. When Ursy was thirteen years old and completely desolate, Flossie came along like a plain but comforting goddess and snatched her up into a system of pink clouds. She still sees her as the beneficent super-mother. Flossie had a complete success with Ursula. She caught her young. She loaded her down with a sense of gratitude and gingered her up with inoculations of heroine-worship. Flossie was, as people say, everything to Ursula. She combined the roles of adored form-mistress, Queen-Mother and lover.’

‘I never heard such utter tripe,’ said Ursula, quite undisconcerted by this analysis. ‘All this talk of Queen-Mothers! Do pipe down, darling.’

‘I mean it,’ Fabian persisted. ‘Instead of having a good healthy giggle about some frightful youth or mooning over a talkie idol or turning violently Anglo-Catholic which is the correct behaviour in female adolescence, you converted all these normal impulses into a blind devotion to Flossie.’

‘Shut up, do. We’ve had it all out a dozen times.’

‘It wouldn’t have mattered if it had passed off in the normal way but it became a fixation.’

‘She was marvellous to me. I owed everything to her. I was discreetly grateful. And I loved her. I’d have been a monster if I didn’t. You and your fixations!’

‘Would you believe it,’ said Fabian, angrily addressing himself to Alleyn. ‘This silly girl, although she says she loves me, won’t marry me, not because I’m a bad bargain physically which I admit, but simply because Flossie, who’s dead, screwed some sort of undertaking out of her that she’d give me up.’

‘I promised to wait two years and I’m going to keep my promise.’

‘There!’ cried Fabian triumphantly. ‘A promise under duress if ever there was one. Imagine the interview. All the emotional jiggery-pokery that she’d tried on me and then some. “Darling little Ursy, if I’d had a baby of my own she couldn’t have been dearer. Poor old Floosie knows best. You’re making me so unhappy.” Faugh!’ said Fabian violently. ‘It’s enough to make you sick.’

‘I didn’t think anybody ever said “Faugh” in real life,’ Ursula observed. ‘Only Hamlet. “And smelt so. Faugh!” ’

‘That was “Puh!” ’ said Alleyn mildly.