‘I am talking to him,’ Miss Docker explained. ‘You never know with a stroke, you might get through to them. You don’t mind, now do you, dear? I have what they call an intuition. I have been telling him about the process of digestion, which I read about in a medical journal, in a doctor’s home, where I was invited recently.’

Mrs Lillie smiled for the hate she saw in her husband’s eye.

‘Humour the sick,’ Miss Docker said. ‘Keep their interest alive.’

Fanning all the while with the Herald.

‘A norrible fly is threatening to land on the patient’s nose.’

So Miss Docker fanned the prisoner.

‘You, dear,’ she said to his wife, ‘are the kind that dispenses passive charm. I am the practical one. Perhaps there should be two women,’ here she turned to laugh at her friend, ‘in the life of every man.’

But Mrs Lillie only smiled.

For here was Miss Docker, hitting Tom’s nose with the folded Herald. Hitting. Hitting. While she, Millicent Lillie, was only able to smile and tremble.

‘One to bear the brunt,’ Miss Docker shouted.

Smack.

Oh, Mrs Lillie should have cried, my darling, my breath, my life-blood is flowing out of me. Love, she should have said, is dead.

For it was.

She saw that the life had gone out of her husband’s eye. But she was still only able to stand and smile.

‘The other to radiate! ’ Miss Docker laughed.

And swung.

How she wrung the dead man’s hand.

‘Well,’ she said to the old Chinese ladies, ‘everyone must die, only it does not do to talk about it in an institution like this. Some have even died in my arms.’

She put away another photograph.

Horrible though the morning of her husband’s death had been, Mrs Lillie remembered his funeral as worse.

Miss Docker looked at Mrs Lillie. She could not quite forgive her Tom Lillie’s manner of dying. But the funeral, that had been the worst.

Mrs Lillie remembered how her sister Agnes had come, and the Trevelyan girls, always so dependable, even after one’s fortune had gone. They had huddled in the close, chintzy pretence of a room, listening to the dry scratching of magpies on the iron roof. Agnes was helpless enough, but Baby Trevelyan had produced the little flask, the five-and-threepenny size, from her bag, and suggested, not without colour:

‘I think we should all take a good strong nip. Don’t you? In the circumstances?’

Violet Trevelyan fetched the glasses. As for Agnes and Millicent, their hands would not have been capable. And Baby poured.

Conspiracy sustained the mourners. Refinement lay lighter on them as brandy seeped through the labyrinths.

‘Do you think it is the right shade?’ asked Agnes Pinfold, eyeing the smear on her sister’s tumbler.

‘Oh, that was Miss Docker,’ Millicent Lillie explained. ‘She told me lipstick strengthens the morale. I accepted, because it pleases her. You know,’ she said, slowly – she had, in fact, only just discovered, ‘her goodness is a disease. She is sick with it. One must try to be kind to her.’