This sofa was a beautiful shape. It was some thirty years old, and belonged to a period when fashionable sofas and arm-chairs did not look at once fat and brutal, like gangsters, as they do in 1935. And indeed, it is chiefly gangsters who can afford to buy them and to loll in them, so no wonder they resemble their masters, just as the starved comfortless glitter of the steel furniture suggests that it belongs to a rich, unscrupulous psychoanalyst.

But Mrs Carmody’s sofa had broad arms at either end, upon which someone could comfortably sit when the middle of the sofa was full, and its back had an elegant swooping curve which always made Sophia think of a seashell. At present it was covered with a faded old red and white chintz; Sophia planned to have it covered with the same cherry-patterned cotton as the sitting room curtains.

It is possible that the heart of the gentle reader glowed with pleasure on hearing that the cottage had a panelled sitting room, but the panels were neither oak nor romantic. They might have been made of deal, but they were covered so thickly with brown paint that no one could say for certain. True, there was an authentic beam across the middle of the ceiling, but it was covered with the same paper as the ceiling.

This mongrel panelling, combined with the parquet flooring, the sternly repressed beam, the stairs in a cupboard, the modern brick fireplace and the little old door with clouded glass panels, which led into the kitchen and the bathroom, made the cottage unlike anywhere else. No one could say how beautiful! how typical of its period, how romantic, how sweet. The cottage seemed to possess a personality which was its own.

Patched, odd, undated, definitely a place in which no over-rich and ultra-sensitive person could have lived for a day, it could offer neither space nor solitude, because, if one was at home, the light in the sitting room could be seen by friends who walked past just outside; and in they would come, whooping with pleasure. If one wished to make love, one had to retreat to the bathroom or sit on the stairs with the door shut; and everyone could always hear, all over the house, what everyone else was doing and where. It also had draughts, and it did not get much sunlight except in the morning in the summer; during the day it was a little dark, because it was so low built and near the road.

Nevertheless, if the Surgery was an unhappy place, the cottage was certainly a happy one, which immediately enchanted every imaginative person who stepped into it, as well as simple sensible people.

Work stopped on the arrival of Harry. The three sat still in the pleasant, slowly darkening afternoon, with the door open and much work still to be done. Perhaps for the first time in their lives they were consciously and calmly happy. They felt at home.