‘You can never tell with Grace,’ he answered.

So she tried instead to talk about their house, making a certainty of what she had not seen.

‘That second spare room, which probably we shall never use, might be converted into a kind of work-room,’ she suggested.

‘What would we do with all that stuff – all the furniture?’ he asked.

Perhaps it was the late hour which seemed to have made him grumpy.

The house was at least a solid, if dark reality, which they approached, for some mechanical reason by little jerks, down a formidable gravel drive. She tried to identify the shapes of shrubs, show her intention of belonging.

‘Aren’t those photinias?’ she asked, with such a degree of pleasure nobody would have guessed at her allergy.

But he was not altogether pleased.

‘The garden isn’t what it ought, or used to be.’ he said. ‘Used to pay a fellow to come in a day or two in the week. It wasn’t worth it, though. Doing me such an honour, at such a price.’

‘They are like that,’ she murmured as though she knew.

Whereas all she knew, in fact, was that her husband’s house was looming awfully in the darkness. It would be better perhaps when they got inside, which they did in some awkwardness, lugging luggage, and bumping into formal obstructions, from which, in one instance, she heard an outraged tinkling. She feared she must have put her elbow through one of the panes of one of those cabinets which serve as a repository for useless glass.

Finally Hessell Mortlock found the switch, and they were standing amongst furniture.

‘Grace must have gone out,’ he mumbled. ‘It’s late,’ he kept on saying, but more for himself in the deserted house. ‘It’s late.’

While he stamped through the rooms, as though it had been winter, switching on lights, and looking for some spirit-deputy of his sister’s, which his companion already felt he needn’t bother to do, she strayed hesitantly, amongst all that brooding furniture. And the roses. The neglected roses. For somebody had filled the rooms with silver vases and cut-glass bowls of roses. There they were, the brown roses, in some cases almost turned to metal, to bronze. The petals of the dead roses creaked as she passed.

And he came out of a room, his face quite red and blank, saying, again for himself: ‘Grace has gone. Her wardrobe’s empty.’

‘Perhaps she’s been called away. Perhaps she’s left a note in the kitchen.’

But as she went past him, in a fit of possessive curiosity, into what had been her sister-in-law’s room, she knew that Miss Mortlock had not had, and would not have any intention of writing. In one of the drawers which he had pulled out she observed a reel of dental floss, and the corpse of a blow-fly, so very frail.

Then Mrs Mortlock began to affect cheerfulness. After all, vows had been made. She began to elbow her way about.

‘At least we’ve got to eat,’ she said. ‘At least she must have left something to start us on.’