‘Georgie, why did she come into my kitchen like a burglar on Boxing Day?’ she asked. ‘She told me she had come to thank me for that pâté I sent her. But that wasn’t true: anyone could see that it wasn’t. Nobody goes into kitchens to thank people for pâtés.’

‘Diva guessed that she had gone there to see the Christmas tree,’ said Georgie. ‘You weren’t on very good terms at the time. We all thought that brilliant of her.’

‘Then why shouldn’t she have said so?’ asked Lucia. ‘I believe it was something much meaner and more underhand than that. And I am convinced – I have those perceptions sometimes, as you know very well – that all through the months of our Odyssey she wanted to tell me why she was there, and was ashamed of doing so. Naturally I never asked her, because if she didn’t choose to tell me, it would be beneath me to force a confidence. There we were together on the Gallagher Banks, she all to bits all the time, and I should have scorned myself for attempting to worm it out of her. But the more I think of it, Georgie, the more convinced I am, that what she had to tell me and couldn’t, concerned that. After all, I had unmasked every single plot she made against me before, and I knew the worst of her up till that moment. She had something on her mind, and that something was why she was in my kitchen.’

Lucia’s faraway prophetic aspect cleared.

‘I shall find out all right,’ she said. ‘Poor Elizabeth will betray herself some time. But, Georgie, how in those weeks I missed my music! Not a piano on board any of the trawlers assembled there! Just a few concertinas and otherwise nothing except cod. Let us go, in a minute, into my music-room and have some Mozartino again. But first I want to say one thing.’

Georgie took a rapid survey of all he had done in his conviction that Lucia had long ago been drowned. But if she knew about the memorial service and the cenotaph there could be nothing more except the kitchen table, and that was now in its place again. She knew all that mattered. Lucia began to speak baby-talk.

‘Georgie,’ she said. ‘’Oo have had dweffel disappointy –’

That was too much. Georgie thumped the table quite hard.

‘I haven’t,’ he cried. ‘How dare you say that?’

‘Ickle joke, Georgie,’ piped Lucia. ‘Haven’t had joke for so long with that melancholy Liblib. ’Pologise. ’Oo not angry wif Lucia?’

‘No, but don’t do it again,’ said Georgie. ‘I won’t have it.’

‘You shan’t then,’ said Lucia, relapsing into the vernacular of adults. ‘Now all this house is spick and span, and Grosvenor tells me you’ve been paying all their wages, week by week.’

‘Naturally,’ said Georgie.