Janet lay back in her chair and stared at the sky. She felt round for the right way to start the conversation. Could her mother really not realize how ill she looked? Maggie always had held a theory that giving in was a mistake, that you felt worse once you lay down. Was this theory keeping her going now? “She’s a funny person, your mother,” the doctor had said. “She’s got so much grit and nervous energy, she’ll go on working when any oilier woman would be an invalid; but just for that reason we’ve got to go carefully with her. She’s never been really ill in her life, and like so many healthy people, she’s inclined to think that a lot of so-called illnesses are imagination. If I were to tell her now that she’s got a bad heart, it would be a nasty shock. If I say it’s bad, she’ll believe me. Have you ever seen a kid learning to swim? As long as they think they can do it they get along fine, but lose confidence and they sink.” Janet had never forgotten that talk; it had given her a cold feeling at the pit of the stomach then, and the memory of it gave it to her now. She swallowed her feelings and spoke cheerfully.

“Well, what about these worries?”

Maggie took her time. Her needles clicked quite a while before she said:

“It’s Sheila. I’ve failed with her, Janet. As you know, I never meant to force her into a life she didn’t like. I knew her heart was set on going on the films, and though I didn’t like it, and your dad would have hated it, I’d have let her have her way if she got a chance, but it’s such an insecure life, I felt I had to see that she was properly trained for something else. Once she was trained as a shorthand-typist I didn’t mean to insist on her working in an office for more than six months. I couldn’t know the war was coming. Like everybody else, I hoped we’d escape it.”

“She knows that.”

“She doesn’t. She blames me for what she calls ‘ruining her life’. Can’t you see how discontented she’s looking?”

“But it’s nonsense!”

“I know, but she doesn’t see it that way. She thinks if I’d let her try for film work as soon as she left school, she’d have got a contract before the war started, and that now she’d be making films for the Ministry of Information and all that. She cuts bits out of the paper about all these film girls who get parts, and she slams them down under my nose and says, ‘Look, that might have been me!’”

“She seemed quite pleased to move to Worsingfold.”