My mother-in-law was adept at making herself unpleasantly clear without ever actually being explicit and since Hethersett had started becoming a regular visitor to her home she was ex­celling even her past performances. There had recently been con­versations about the general undesirability of fortune-hunters, the proclivity of low people for low pothouses (this was after I’d helped one of the labourers at the works to wet his baby’s head) and the importance of Harry speaking properly. He had to go to boarding-school; it was too easy to pick up the wrong accent at home – I mean, in Warley. . . . But I’d known that the slip wasn’t Freudian, I knew who had the wrong accent. Her son-in-law had. Hethersett hadn’t; he’d been to Harrow and there had ac­quired a genuine public school face; it was as if the bones had been taken out of it and replaced by some harder and smoother but far more malleable substance, something that could be set overnight into any shape desired. Presumably there he had also acquired gentlemanly tastes: he actually went shooting and fish­ing and would have loved to hunt, but couldn’t spare the time, old boy. Most important of all, his father was the Managing Director of the Hethersett Steel Corporation, a huge concern in the Midlands with which we’d done business from time to time. I wondered again what exactly was the purpose of Hethersett’s visit and then ceased to care. It suddenly seemed more important to recreate the face of the girl behind me. Grey eyes, close-curling brown hair, rather large teeth, a rosy complexion. She’d be in her middle twenties. This was the inventory of the items which made up her face: it didn’t explain it, didn’t explain that ex­pression of tranquillity.

When the service had ended and I had at last the opportunity to look at her again, I turned expecting disappointment. It was the Spring, I said to myself, it was the sunshine and stained glass windows, it was the words of the Book of Common Prayer; it was perhaps only my own need of tranquillity. Her face would be as dead or as disturbed as the rest. But it was exactly as I’d re­membered it. I started to think constructively from sheer force of habit. Warley being a small town, and she being a newcomer, I would meet her sooner or later. I would make it sooner. On surface appearances alone she seemed the kind of person with whom we might credibly be friendly; her clothes were good but unobtrusive and she had the appearance of someone who had a bath and changed her underwear every day.

Above all, there was the fact of her being in church. Once it would have been almost obligatory for one to attend church, so there was no particular social cachet attached to churchgoing in itself. Then it became unfashionable; and now, in Warley at least, it had become fashionable again. No one would lose the good opinion of the community because they didn’t go to church; but they wouldn’t lose it if they did go.