Beatrice stood up stiffly. ‘I’m going to walk on,’ she told them. ‘Give my love to Stephen, won’t you, next time you see him?’

‘Beatrice,’ Chloe said quickly, ‘if it’s any consolation, it won’t last for ever. Pansy is already looking over his shoulder.’

Beatrice laughed without amusement. ‘It isn’t any consolation. Do you suppose that Stephen will want to come back when Pansy has finished with him? Or that I should take him back? What would you do? No.’ She answered herself. ‘There isn’t any point in asking you that. You couldn’t know what fifteen years of marriage is like without having lived it.’ Beatrice pulled her raincoat more tightly around her, ready to walk on, and then remembered something. ‘Helen, I heard about your engagement. I wish you both every happiness. Don’t take Stephen and me as an advertisement for marriage. At least, don’t take what you can see now.’ Suddenly she smiled, and the years fell away from her face. ‘Anyway, one survives. Somehow one survives. Women are much better at that than men, you know.’

In that moment they glimpsed her mettle. Beatrice was brave, and she had the enviable clear-sightedness of experience.

‘Goodbye, Helen, Chloe. Come out to the Rectory and see me sometime. I could do with the company.’ Then she turned and walked away along the river path, a slight figure in a black raincoat with her head held up.

There was a long silence before Chloe said savagely, ‘He doesn’t deserve her, does he?’ And then, with the anger giving way to weariness, ‘Why are we all such fools? Except you, Helen.’

‘Oh, I’m the biggest fool of all.’ Helen’s voice was so low that Chloe turned to her, uncertain of whether she had heard correctly. Helen gave her no chance to press her any further. ‘Come on,’ she said, with a pretence of briskness. ‘I really need a cup of coffee. Let’s go to the market.’

The indoor market with its rows of close-packed shops and stalls was beginning to fill up with people in search of breakfast after a long night. The taxi-drivers’ cafe in the middle was packed with a motley crowd of people, porters in overalls and impatient cab-drivers and jostling students, some of them still wet from the river, and a sprinkling of faintly defiant people in evening clothes. The atmosphere was thick with frying bacon, and the windows were running with condensation.

‘Can you stand this?’ Chloe asked.

‘Just about.’

They found themselves two seats and wrapped their hands gratefully round thick white pint-mugs of coffee. Helen had barely tasted hers before there was a crash behind her, a roar of warning and then someone fell against her so that coffee slopped over her fingers. Protestingly she turned around and half recognised the four reddened faces scuffling together.