And now she was going to have her name in gold script above the shop: Mrs Morrissey’s High Class Tea Rooms. The future was going to be perfumed with raspberry jam and freshly baked scones and fragrant lemon cake. With a dairyman on Carter Street, she placed a substantial twice-weekly order of Devon clotted cream.

ONE AFTERNOON AT MRS MORRISSEY’S

Perhaps because of its excellent location on Camden Street and because Mrs Morrissey’s builders had unearthed a pretty fireplace, with a serviceable chimney, from behind the coffin samples, where she was able to install a coal fire to warm her clientele on cold autumn afternoons, the Tea Rooms soon enough drew people to them in highly satisfactory numbers.

Word also went around Bath that Clorinda Morrissey could make a Victoria Sponge as light as a goosedown pillow, that the tea was always Best Assam, with no added dross, and that the atmosphere of the place was such as to make people feel that this particular teashop was a place outside time, an oasis or a fragrant island, a place where nothing bad could ever come upon them while they were there.

This was due not only to the brightly burning coals and to the excellent cakes, but to the personality of Clorinda Morrissey herself – to her quiet movement among her guests and to her sweet Irish voice, which was like a kind of soothing music permeating the air. She greeted all her clientele – whether duchess or daughter-of-trade, whether baronet or baritone in the local choral society – with a smile of exquisite courtesy and compassion, as though she had known these strangers through all the vicissitudes of their lives.

More than this, she was pleased, as time went by, to stumble upon the realisation that some people soon began to choose Mrs Morrissey’s Tea Rooms as a favoured location for conversations of great intensity or confessions of the utmost importance. Watching from her service counter, from behind the bewitching array of jam tarts, crumpets, iced buns and fruit muffins, she could see them displace to one side the cake stand which she always set down in the middle of the table, in order to lean towards each other, so that their heads were almost touching. She saw gloves removed and hands grasped. She heard sighs and laughter and sometimes glimpsed tears sliding down an alabaster cheek and falling into the Assam. These things gave her great gladness of heart. She was someone at last. She was Mrs Morrissey of Camden Street and humanity came gathering to her sheltering bosom.

On this particular afternoon, the man arrived first.

Mrs Morrissey knew him as Dr Valentine Ross, one of the scores of medical men who made a good living from the cavalcade of invalids who came to Bath to take the waters and who liked to be encouraged in this and other cures for their ailments by reassuringly expensive doctors.

He was a strong-looking man in his thirties, of mid-height, with dark hair beginning to recede a little. Perhaps there was a suggestion of cruelty in his narrow blue eyes, but his manners towards Mrs Morrissey had always been impeccable. Often he’d come alone to the Tea Rooms, not to eat anything, but to sip tea and smoke a cheroot and seem to ponder some tangled or wayward question lurking beneath his conventional outward appearance. Sometimes, he’d engage Clorinda Morrissey in courteous conversation, asking her about the city of Dublin, its joys and woes, its prosperity and its poverty. He always listened carefully and once said to her that he was ‘ashamed’ to know so little of the world outside Bath.