I told nobody. Max might have helped me but he was the last person I’d have told. On my way to phone my mother one Sunday I encountered him coming out of the drawing room. He stopped and asked me how I was progressing at my polytechnic in the tone some people use when asking children how they are getting on at school. I said everything was fine and he didn’t pursue it, only pursing his lips and frowning in the way that made him look like a cross Pekingese.

I was desperately lonely. That was when I started talking to old Mrs. Fisherton. I don’t mean I believe in ghosts or ever did, I never really thought she was there, but we do talk to people in our heads, usually people we love, and we no more get answers from them than I did from her. I told her about GUP and how awful it was and sometimes I asked her what would become of me if I did no work, got no qualification, so that there was nothing for it in the end but to go back to Suffolk and my parents. I couldn’t talk to Daniel in his silver frame, he seemed in a strange way more dead than she was, perhaps because of my ever-present guilt.

One morning when I should have been attending a lecture and demonstration on marketing but was lying in bed instead, looking at the segment of pale sky above the wall, something set the wire hangers in the wardrobe jangling and when I turned round I saw a small old woman standing in the doorway. I didn’t scream, I was paralyzed with fright. A prior belief in ghosts isn’t necessary when you see a ghost. A ghostly manifestation would be a miracle and the laws of nature overturned. I thought, I’ve brought her back by talking to her. Like a medium might, I’ve conjured her up.

“Sorry to intrude, love,” she said, “but it’s my morning for cleaning down here.”

Of course there were no ghosts and of course old Mrs. Fisherton was dead and gone. I got up, I said to give me five minutes and I’d be dressed. I’d be ready and I’d make her a cup of tea. Her first name was Beryl and I never knew her by any other, though of course I found out later, when she gave me a home and looked after me, that she was called Mrs. Collett. She is still one of my best friends.

Old Mrs. Fisherton was past ninety when she died but Beryl wasn’t really old, though she seemed so to me then. I suppose she was still under sixty. She wore trousers that she called slacks and bright-colored sweaters. Her face was old and her hair thin and gray, but her figure was like a young girl’s, which I later learned she attributed to never having put on weight and never having lost any. Food she thought one of life’s nuisances and she ate little; she ate to live. She showed no surprise at my being there and being still in bed at ten-thirty. It was what she expected from “the young,” of whom she had several of her own.