“I like the way Janet plans to live in the cottage and turn me out. Who got the cottage, anyway?”

“You did,” Janet agreed. “And if you like to take on the job of teaching Iris you can stop in it. Or how about the Land Army? I expect you could get a job somewhere round here when you’re trained.”

Maggie chuckled.

“I’d get a real laugh at Sheila in the Land Army!”

Sheila had to smile.

“So’d I. That’s one thing I’ll never do.”

Maggie took Janet’s cup to refill it.

“I should go and have a talk with the Labour Exchange people. They’ll have a lot to tell you about jobs, but I should think, being a shorthand-typist, you’ll do something in that line.”

Sheila held out her cup for more tea. Her eyes were lowered so her mother could not get an idea of her thoughts.

“I’ll see. If you turn me out, it’s my business what I do.” Maggie and Janet washed up and cleared away. Sheila lit a cigarette and strolled off into the garden, and Janet said nothing. There had been enough argument for one night. For quite a time there was silence in the kitchen, both Maggie and Janet turning over in their heads the scene at the table. Maggie was trying not to feel wretched. Sheila was her baby, and what she would have liked to have done was to run out and give her a hug, and tell her that of course she was only to do just what she wanted, that Mother wasn’t really hard and unkind. In fact she wanted to take back not only what she had just said, but what she had been working herself up for weeks to say. Instead she wiped the dishes, and made herself stay where she was. She knew she had done the right thing, and only the foolish side of her mother-love was saying she had been cruel. All very well if you were rich, and if there wasn’t a war, to give in to a lovely, idle little creature, but this was not a world of fairy-tales but of exceedingly cold reality.

Janet, her arms in the basin, her hands busy, was still puzzling over Sheila. Why had she picked Worsingfold? What had she hoped for?

“Mum,” she said suddenly, “is there a film studio near here?”

Maggie at once got on to where Janet’s thoughts had landed. “No, dear. I’d thought of that. Nothing of the sort. Nor does anyone connected with the film industry have a house here.”

“Then there must be a man.”