‘So how did it go? We married and came here, and he started writing some god-awful book, and Rose and he sat in each other’s pockets and the county called. Yes, they called, all right, talking one language to each other and another one to me. Old Occy Phinn, as mad as a meat-axe and doesn’t even keep himself clean. The Fat Woman of Nunspardon who took one look at me and then turned polite for the first time in history. Rose, trying so hard to be nice, it’s a wonder she didn’t rupture something. The parson and his wife and half a dozen women dressed in tweed sacks and felt buckets with faces like the backside of a mule. My God, what have they got? They aren’t fun, they aren’t gay, they don’t do anything and they look like the wreck of the schooner Hesperus. Talk about a living death! And me! Dumped like a sack and meant to be grateful!’

‘You don’t understand,’ Nurse Kettle began and then gave it up. Kitty had doubled her left hand into a fist and was screwing it into the palm of the right, a strangely masculine gesture at odds with her enamelled nails.

‘Don’t!’ Nurse Kettle said sharply. ‘Don’t do that.’

‘Not one of them, not a damn’ one was what you might call friendly.’

‘Well, dear me, I must say! What about Sir George!’ Nurse Kettle cried, exasperated and rattled into indiscretion.

‘George! George wanted what they all want and now things have got awkward he doesn’t want that. George! George, the umpteenth baronet, is in a muck-sweat. George can’t think,’ Kitty said in savage mimicry, ‘what people might not be saying. He told me so himself! If you knew what I know about George …’ Her face, abruptly, was as blank as a shuttered house. ‘Everything,’ she said, ‘has gone wrong. I just don’t have the luck.’

All sorts of notions, scarcely comprehensible to herself, writhed about in the mid-region of Nurse Kettle’s thoughts. She was reminded of seaweed in the depths of a marine pool. Monstrous revelations threatened to emerge and were suppressed by a sort of creaming over of the surface of her mind. She wanted to go away from Kitty Cartarette before any more was done to her innocent idolatries, and yet found herself unable to make the appropriate gestures of departure. She was held in thrall by a convention. Kitty had been talking dismally for some time and Nurse Kettle had not listened. She now caught a desultory phrase.

‘Their fault!’ Kitty was saying. ‘You can say what you like, but whatever has happened is their fault.’

‘No, no, no!’ Miss Kettle cried out, beating her short scrubbed hands together. ‘How can you think that! You terrify me. What are you suggesting?’

II