Her former home in Hampstead was up for sale when she decided to return south and she had bought it without thinking twice, its availability as though Fate had intended her to live out her years alone in the flat in which she and Ralph had spent the bulk of their married life.

In her bleak moments there was the comfort of having Martin – Laura too – a stone’s throw away. Also the stimulation of imbibing once again the lively atmosphere of Hampstead Village, where the famous rubbed shoulders with arty young people and a motley of tourists. There was too the pleasure of walking on the Heath, where once she had walked on Sunday afternoons with Ralph.

Now there was only his memory to keep her company. Increasingly Marianne’s personal solitude was making itself felt. How had her mother and her grandmother dealt with it? Both had had what they had referred to as ‘chances’. Marianne, too. In her working world she encountered interesting men and had dated several. Jake had introduced her to a fellow South African on the lookout for a second wife, which Marianne had not known until Laura whispered the information to her in the restaurant where Jake’s matchmaking exercise took place.

His friend had proved to be attractive and personable. But Marianne had yet to meet the man for whom she would renounce the independence she would not have chosen, but valued now that she had it.

With Ralph she had not minded the disadvantages of sharing one’s life with another. But they had met and fallen in love when they were young, feeling their way together along a sometimes rocky path, and still friends and lovers when they reached their fifties.

Nowadays, though, Marianne reflected wryly, a relationship did not have to include marriage and the loss of independence that went with it. Even the middle-aged and some of the elderly had accepted for themselves the behaviour patterns that had horrified them when their children and grandchildren began thumbing their noses at convention.

Shirley had had at least two resident boyfriends, no doubt with marriage in mind though it had not come to that. And Uncle Nat had recently found himself a girlfriend two years his senior, with whom he had spent a holiday in Majorca which Leona suspected had included their sharing a room. There would be no shenanigans in his house, though, lest Bridie walk out on him!

Marianne smiled at the thought of two septuagenarians enjoying what would once have been called an illicit love affair. Bend with the wind of change though she had, what would Sarah Sandberg have had to say about that!

She put the cover on her typewriter, at which she was seated musing after completing a difficult chapter, and went to remove a wilted leaf from the Busy Lizzie that lived in the window bay, behind the old leather Chesterfield where she sometimes sat to do her thinking.