Janet fiddled with the tea-pot lid. Her eyes glowed with rage. So this was what Sheila had been up to! The little devil. She had not been told about her mother’s heart because she could never keep anything to herself, but she had been told her mother was not well and must be got away and must rest, and that she was going to be told that she, Sheila, had anaemia as a means to lure her into the country. And this was how she had played up! Lazy little beast, trading on what she knew to be an imaginary illness in order to slack about doing nothing.

“It’s lovely having you here,” said Maggie. “I’ve such a lot of little problems to talk over.”

Janet looked out of the window. The sun was shining on a rambler rose; there was a grassy mound near it, just the place to lie and look at the sky, and rest on your first holiday in two years. Then she straightened her back and threw up her chin.

“I can see with half an eye I shall have tons to talk about, and tons to do.”

Section 2

Sheila had gone to a cottage to fetch the eggs. Janet had taken three chairs on to the lawn, gently pushed her mother into one, and picked up her feet and put them on another. Maggie looked at her feet as if they didn’t belong to her.

“Really, Jan! Making me look silly! Whatever will people think!”

“That you’re an incurable Cockney. You live in the country now, you haven’t got neighbours to think anything.”

Maggie was knitting a khaki sock. She laid it down to laugh.

“It’s you that’s the Cockney. You’d be surprised how much Worsingfold knows. Why, there won’t be a soul who didn’t know you were coming today, or that old Tom had been engaged to drive you from the station. And they’ll know about my feet too. I don’t know how they see things, but they do. In a day or two’s time someone will say to me: You’ll be feeling stronger now your daughter’s home.’ That’ll mean that a story’s gone round that you came because I was ill, and it will have started because you put my feet up.”