She looked over her shoulder at the eighteenth-century map of the world on the wall to my left. She went over to straighten it. Her thumb on a dolphin, she said coldly:

“Has she got sick of you, then?”

“She was trying to arrange my future only this lunchtime.”

She stepped a few inches back from the map, her head on one side.

“Including your new family?”

“There isn’t going to be a new family,” I said. “I have one already.”

“Do you want to stay?”

She seemed to be standing more erect than I remembered; but there was a slight droop about her shoulders as if she were aware of some new burden.

I sat down. “It isn’t easy,” I said.

“Do you want to stay?”

Suddenly I remembered her handing me the keys of the car. It was something I should not have forgotten. She had been on my side. She had been on my side as I had been on Harry’s side tonight.

“I want to stay,” I said.

She knelt down and unfastened my shoes. “Do you really want to stay or are you just being noble?”

“I don’t know whether I’m noble or not, I only know what I’ve got to do.”

She brought over my slippers. “He’s like you,” she said.

“Who’s like me?”

“Harry.” She put on my slippers. “He wants to please every­body and he wants to be his own master, too.”

“I don’t know much about him. Or you.”

She smiled. “We know more now, don’t we?”

I heard a voice from upstairs, growing from a whine to a yell.

“That’s my daughter,” I said. “Does she know I’m here?”

Susan shook her head. “Keep quiet, Joe. Maybe she’ll go back.”

There was the sound of footsteps. Susan went to the door, frowning. Barbara stood there weeping, her poodle under her arm. She ran to Susan.

“I want a drink juice, Mummy.”

I knelt down and put my arms around them both.

“Where’ve you been, Daddy?”

“Earning pennies.”

“A big lot of pennies,” she said, drowsily. “A big lot of pennies.”

Susan put her down on the sofa. “Stay there with Daddy whilst I get you a drink, darling.”

“No,” she said. “Daddy, get the juice! With ice in it. And straws.”

I went into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator then re­membered that she didn’t drink orange juice at night. I mixed a drink of Kia-Ora in her Flopsy Bunny mug and took it into the drawing-room.