Since her husband’s departure she had secretly looked forward to the time when, his education complete, Claud would flit into the outer world, leaving her to do whatever she wished with an uncluttered conscience. Now she felt threatened. Claud looked like settling in the town he had affected to despise all the years they had lived in it. He was making friends with locals who up to now had not been worth his trouble. Being herself naturally unsociable Margaret had, when her husband embarrassed her with his quarrelsome drinking, kept aloof from people. When he left her she remained withdrawn; his absence made no difference. As he grew up Claud had clearly found home boring, had preferred to spend holidays away with friends, sulked when he had to be at home. She knew that he thought her dull; indeed, in adolescence, he often said so. She had never anticipated his wanting to live near or with her when he left university.

She now saw her solitude at risk. She blamed herself for introducing him to Laura at the concert, so brilliant against the drab background. She felt threatened when, several times during his first week in the loft, Claud dropped in to share her meals, bringing with him his laundry to feed her washing machine, taking the opportunity to have a bath. Her hot water system was, it seemed, more reliable than the Kennedys’. He brought his new friends, Brian and Susie, for drinks; asked whether he could bring Mavis for supper, making it impossible for her to refuse. A mild hint she dropped about independence and doing his own washing he ignored. He was, he said, working hard on his novel, getting inspiration from local colour; he looked round the kitchen when he said this, fingering her electric whisk or fidgeting with the mixer in a way which made her uneasy.

Irrationally Margaret blamed Laura for all this. Mavis, a more obvious cause of potential trouble, worried her not at all; it was the idea of Laura that caused angst. However private and withdrawn she had been during the years she had lived in the neighbourhood, she had not escaped hearing that the Thornbys had a reputation. The old brother and sister were said to be odd, and Laura a mischief-monger; nobody knew why she had not married or what she did when she was elsewhere. She had rented the Kennedys’ loft for many years, but latterly had taken over the back premises of the Old Rectory, building a brick partition between herself and the old people. Some person had joked that she had created not a granny flat but a manic’s flat. Margaret was on Christian name terms with the Thornbys, as everybody was with everyone these days, a habit caught from America; she greeted them cheerily in public but had no wish to enlarge her acquaintance.