“Don’t talk like that,” Sybil said. “You don’t know how lucky you are.” She looked at me with a faint flirtatiousness. “My dear, I’ll swap husbands with you any time. Joe lives for his children and his work. Mark just lives for his pleasures. His sordid plea­sures, his low rotten pleasures.”

“I can guess,” Susan said.

“No, you can’t. Your husband doesn’t run after everything in skirts, your husband loves his wife and children, your husband has always had a sense of responsibility. Mark’s shifted all his life. From place to place, from job to job, from mess to mess – he doesn’t care. Oh, he could be a success if he chose to – he’s very clever and very charming. But he can’t be bothered. So the painstaking dull people get ahead of him. Oh God, I wish sometimes he weren’t so damned clever and charming. I wish things had been more difficult for him, I wish he were just a steady plodder like Joe.”

“Thank you,” I said. She didn’t appear to hear me.

“Do you know what he’s doing tonight? Playing in a darts tour­nament. He’ll have been home by now, he’ll have read my note but it won’t have bothered him. He’ll eat some bread and cheese and stroll down to the pub and drink beer and play darts and be matey with every Tom, Dick and Harry and they’ll all love it. They’ll be thrilled, he’s such a gentleman.”

She pronounced the last word with the same scornful em­phasis that I would have employed once.

“Don’t be bitter and twisted, love,” I said. “He’s not as bad as all that.”

“You always stick up for each other,” she said. “I’ve stuck up for him myself hundreds of times. But it’s over now. I’ve seen right through him. Oh God, I don’t know where to turn . . .” This time there was a note of real desolation in her voice.

“You really do need a drink,” I said.

“I need oblivion,” she said. “A long, long rest. I’m so tired of being hurt.”

“You can stay here, if you like,” Susan said. “Harry’s not here now, so we can put up the camp bed—” She outlined the sleep­ing arrangements rapidly and cheerfully as if it would be great fun for me to sleep on the sofa and to share the house with Sybil and the Pudding Faced Bawlers; she hadn’t been so eager the last time that I suggested we should have Uncle Dick and Aunt Emily stay the week-end.

“You don’t mind, do you, Joe?”

“Not at all,” I said.

“And Gerda doesn’t leave until Friday, so there’s enough of us to look after the kids.”

I opened the tin of peanuts. “Of course, dear. Glad to be of help.”