“That lady’s had enough,” Jean’s mother commented, causing several heads to turn.

In one corner an old man in green tweeds had fallen asleep over his tea. The cup and saucer rattled perilously between his fluttering hands as it rode the gentle rise and fall of his stomach like a small boat on a rolling sea.

“Can you hear snoring? I can hear snoring,” her mother remarked as Jean dived to rescue the cup before it deposited its contents in the old man’s lap.

On her way back to their island, Jean caught the eye of the downtrodden daughter and they exchanged rueful smiles, but this moment of shared experience gave her no great comfort. Instead, it provided a glimpse of a future that was anything but rosy. “I’m not like her,” she wanted to announce to the room. “I have a career and colleagues who respect me, and there is a man who admires me and knows my worth!” But these certainties had lost some of their bite here, so far from home, and Jean felt something close to panic the next morning when they awoke again to the clatter of rain at the window and the prospect of another day of enforced idleness.

In a fit of desperation, she booked them at the last minute onto a trip to Beaulieu, even though neither of them had any great interest in traveling.

Through the misted windows of the coach the New Forest was a bleak landscape of beaten gorse and clumps of tattered trees under leaden skies. Jean’s mother had got her feet wet on the short walk across the pavement to the pick-up point and this was now the focus of much grumbling. Jean herself, who had been holding but not benefiting from the umbrella and was thoroughly bedraggled, hunched in her seat and smoked furiously.

At Beaulieu, her mother could not be persuaded to leave the bus. It was too wet and cold; the prospect of walking even a few steps defeated her.

“I’m quite happy here looking at the view. You go,” she urged Jean, who needed no prompting to seize a few moments to herself.

She strolled around the shed of vintage cars with the line of other visitors, enjoying the temporary respite from her mother’s stream of comments. Loneliness made some people withdrawn in company, she thought, but others like her mother grew vocal when given an audience, spilling out opinions and observations without any thought for how they might be received.

The allotted hour was longer than was really needed to view the small motorcar collection and those few rooms of the house open to the public, but Jean was in no hurry to return, savoring the silence and the opportunity to wander unencumbered. Her mother had a way of clutching and leaning on her arm as they walked, as if liable to topple over at any moment and determined to take Jean down with her if she did.

When she made her way back to the bus at the appointed time, she found it ready to depart, the engine running and the other passengers waiting and restive. She stumbled down the aisle to her seat, raked by disapproving looks.