‘How late?’

‘Oh, about half past twelve, I should think.’

‘Who are you?’ asked the voice rudely, like a crocodile cheated of its prey and prepared to snap at anything.

‘I’m just a friend. I’m just keeping an eye on the cottage while they’re out.’

‘Where’ve they gone?’

‘Pictures!’ gesticulated Sophia, who was hanging over the telephone.

‘They’ve gone to the pictures, I think. I’m not sure, really. I’m so sorry.’

‘Well …’ said the voice, unwillingly preparing to retreat. ‘It’s very queer, I must say. Going out to the pictures on the night you move into a new place. Can’t understand it. Well, tell them I ’phoned up. Aunt Maxine.’

‘Yes. I’m so sorry,’ and Celia hung up the receiver. ‘Goodbye.’

‘I’m sure she didn’t believe a word of it,’ she said reproachfully.

Everyone said they didn’t care if she didn’t, tea was begun again, and Aunt Maxine forgotten.

There were one or two more disturbances to jar the tranquillity of the evening’s pleasures; at seven o’clock Uncle Preston rang up to ask if Sophia had had that stair mended yet, and went up in a sheet of flame on hearing that she had not; and at a quarter to nine Angela rang up just to ask if Francis would be her partner at a dance given by the local Badminton Club, and Francis, refusing to speak to her, deputed Sophia to say no he couldn’t.

During these interruptions the work of getting straight went on; Sophia went out with a fourpenny-halfpenny shopping basket made of purple and green bast on her arm, and climbed the exhausting hill to the High Street, where she bought food for the weekend, and wondered as she walked dreamily under the shop lights which always seem brighter on Saturday night and among the smells of bruised celery and coffee, whether there would always be quite so much to do in the cottage? Her legs ached, her back and arms ached and her ankles turned over three times on the greasy pavements, as they always did when she was extremely tired.

But when she got home again, it was so delightful to knock at the door of this tiny house with the rosy windows, and to have the door opened by Francis and all the bundles taken from her cramped hands, that she forgot her tiredness in the thought that this was theirs, their home for a year at least, with all its comforts and peace.

She thought of the number of times she would open the door with her own key, at the end of a long hard day, and see the sofa, the Collection and the gramophone and the little door that looked like a cupboard but was just nothing; and she was happy.

After supper they sat on the sofa in front of the fire and Francis played on his ukulele those sombre little songs set with short curt slang words resembling nuts and bolts and screws, which he and his generation love.