‘But we have no fowls,’ she said. ‘They smell.’

He continued reading.

‘Or perhaps you would like me to buy you some,’ she considered. ‘Half-a-dozen chickens,’ she begged. ‘The grown-up kind. Those little day-old things are such a trouble, and you’d be sure to catch a cold.’

Charles said:

‘No.’

He continued reading.

Mrs Polkinghorn could not endure the creaking of that huge leather arm-chair. She was glad of Norman’s lawn-mower. With only a little collaboration from her mind, the blast from the machine could destroy almost all other noises, sensations, presences.

‘Well,’she sighed.

She rearranged her hat. It was the big old straw she wore for the garden, but like all large floppy hats, it suited and pleased Mrs Polkinghorn. The big droopy ones created an atmosphere of weddings.

‘Did you go,’ she remembered, ‘to the gate, to see whether the postman has brought our letters?’

‘No,’ he answered.

His cheek did twitch just a little. Or was it another of those infinitesimal wrinkles opening in the skin.

‘But why, darling?’

He was reading, and reading.

Mrs Polkinghorn could not control her irritated breath.

‘Then I shall have to fetch them myself. Harriet is busy, and Norman so rude, one hardly dares suggest any longer.’

She went out, into the garden she had planned herself, though that landscape creature had claimed the credit. The house, with its little seemly lozenges of leaded panes, set in the Tudor sprawl of shaggy brick, was by now far too big, but when Dickie died she had determined she would make the effort to keep it up. Now she walked along the path, touching the roses of which she was proud. Somewhere jasmine whipped her cheek. You could not say it was a sob that burst from her mouth, but refractory jasmine did recall the contrariety of life.

Nothing but bills, of course. At best, receipts. Two of the more sumptuous circulars for Charles, and the Firm’s report from Cousin Ken.

After Charles’ ‘withdrawal’, Mrs Polkinghorn had arranged – in confidence – with Cousin Ken and Mrs Beddoes that the Firm’s reports be forwarded regularly to her son. To keep him in the picture, she said It pleased Mrs Polkinghorn to collect the idiom of those decades to which she had never succeeded in belonging. Her theft of such phrases made her feel she had entered into conspiracy.

But this morning events seemed to be conspiring against her. She almost tripped near the steps, by slipping her foot into a noose of the couch-grass Norman could never be persuaded to uproot.

She went on, clutching her bills.

Dickie would have attended to bills. Dickie Polkinghorn, a larger man, though mild, whom almost everyone had forgotten. Even his widow was sometimes surprised on catching sight of Dickie’s face in one of the many silver frames which contained all that was left of him.

But I did, did love darling Dickie.

Thus assured, Mrs Polkinghorn returned to the dining-room with the letters. She did not wish to. It was her duty, however.