“I thought something must have happened to you,” said her mother. “Everyone’s been waiting.”

It had grown cold in the bus with the engine off and she had shrunk inside her coat, the collar up to her ears.

“I’m not late,” Jean whispered back, offering up her watch face in evidence. “Everyone else was early.”

It would have been easy enough to apologize, but she was too mortified.

The driver took a circuitous route back through Brockenhurst and Sway, “to enjoy the scenery,” he said mirthlessly over the whine of the windscreen wipers and the machine-gun rattle of rain on the metal roof. Between the fug of cigarette smoke within and the boiling skies without, the picturesque views stood no chance.

“Well that was a disappointment, I must say,” was Jean’s mother’s verdict as the guests trooped back into the hotel, shaking out their umbrellas, filling the lobby with clouds of vapor and a mushroomy smell of wet raincoat.

This remark prompted general agreement from the company. They began to exchange other reassuring banalities about the weather and the risks of off-season travel until the icy reserve of the past few days was thoroughly melted and they moved into the lounge as a united band, grumbling cheerfully. Later, Jean’s mother would describe it as the best day of the entire holiday.

The exertions of the outing must have exhausted her, as she went to bed early. They had eaten their last meal in the dining room—tomato soup, fishcakes with sauté potatoes and peas and sherry trifle—and played cribbage with a retired bank manager and his wife who were part of the Beaulieu contingent. It emerged in conversation that they lived less than thirty miles away in Blandford Forum and had been coming to the same hotel every year since the end of the war. Jean, for whom seven days in the place had seemed an eternity, found herself depressed and repelled by their complacency.

They had never been to London and had no desire to go. They had heard it was overrun with traffic and delinquents and they wanted none of it. Other manifestations of progress, the television and the car, were given equally short shrift. The first was a threat to family life; the second was a blight on the countryside and a menace to public safety.

It occurred to Jean to wonder why such sworn enemies of automotive traveling had settled on a trip to Beaulieu, but she was too polite to challenge them. Besides, their opinions were delivered with the sort of assurance that has never experienced dissent and might not even recognize it. Instead, simmering inside, she began to formulate a Pam’s Piece on provincialism, which would of course be unprintable but soothed her bad temper.

In Jean’s mother they had found a somewhat anarchic soul mate; she was inclined to agree with everything they said but occasionally misheard and ended up roundly seconding a quite contrary viewpoint. More than once Jean had to step in and politely steer her back on track. It all made for effortful conversation and Jean was relieved when her mother, wearied by the day’s novelties, declared herself ready for bed.