Lumping herself up, she said: ‘I’d better go. They may be wondering what’s happened to me.’

She was rather pleased with the prudence which had enabled her to handle the most difficult situation of her life, and looked back only once, to see his arm waving with the slow detachment of a gull.

When she got in and found nobody had missed her, Anthea went to her room which, for the present, was what she loved most. She began panting, for consolation, crying for the comfort of it, as she persuaded the indifference out of an old pillow-slip. Presently she fell asleep. She dreamed about her father, who was smoother than fact, or perhaps she had just failed to meet that secret man in the course of their less actual lives. In any case she woke smiling from a dream too garbled to remember. She was glad. And rose to comb the knots out of her painful hair.

7

That night at dinner the Furfields told the story of their courtship and marriage, and everybody pretended to be interested – or perhaps everybody was; the fable revealed such a touching banality.

‘We found that on winter mornings we both chose the east side of the bus, in summer the west,’ Doug Furfield explained.

‘We gathered first of all that we were climatically suited,’ Helen added.

Their plant lives showed too clearly in their faces as they leaned out towards each other from the past, entwined even now, across the table. Anthea could not look at them at last. She was afraid she might be able to offer to the lamplight proof of even a plant existence. Or she looked unintentionally at Barry Flegg. She had already rejected the animal proofs too firmly to hope for a position in an animal world. If she had wanted it. Which she didn’t.

Val Tulloch watched that Anthea digging her table-cloth, old though it was, with the prongs of a fork, wounding or wounded.

Mrs Scudamore rang with the punctuality they had learnt to expect. Everyone sitting round seemed to be waiting for it. Anthea ignored the possibility that it might be somebody else, and fitted her revived face to the archaic receiver.

‘A disaster!’ Mrs Scudamore could not wait because it was hers. ‘Fell on the veranda steps, and sprained my wrist. I had always heard it is cheaper for drunks to fall.’

‘Oh, darling, how dreadful for you! How painful!’

The two voices slipped into one of those duets in which empathy and practice almost totally disguise technique.

‘Just when I was beginning to benefit from the Treatment. Well, we shall get through somehow – a one-armed Christmas. Mrs Meadling, of course, is expecting her daughter and family from Mildura, and no part of her will be available. But we shall get through it. The frightening thing is that Mr Mortlock is due tomorrow evening, and I cannot very well put him off. I mean, he is a person of a certain level, and where levels exist nowadays they have to be respected.’