Once Mrs Mortlock, from behind her Gothic hands, was horrified to receive a vision of the bodies of Barry Flegg and Cherie Smith lashed together by ropes of hair. Lashed and lashing. She was horrified with herself, she felt faint. She would have gone out if it had not been for her husband blocking the way from the pew. Nobody noticed that Mrs Mortlock was perspiring. All she could do was bow her head and suffer the blasphemy which had been thrust upon her. Endure it to the last convulsive shudder.

‘Are you all right?’ he asked at last, noticing something, leaning towards his perhaps valuable possession.

‘Yes.’ She smiled.

She was calm again by the time they left the church, walking with the fine carriage of her assured young-womanhood, while he followed, easing his bones. You can see she’s a lady, voices were heard. Some of the women, of his own age, smiled at Mr Mortlock without composing their mouths at all, because they had known him for years, had been disappointed, and got over it.

Hessell Mortlock was the kind of man who couldn’t resist making a fool of himself, the elderly women had decided long ago, so they invited him and his young wife to eat their chicken à la King and sherry trifle, without any rancour, while smiling at her in a certain fashion, asking her to have another helping when conversation failed – she was so large, too.

‘I couldn’t! It was lovely – lovely,’ the amiable Mrs Mortlock would reply sighing. ‘You must put something special in it, that we ordinary mortals know nothing about.’

Then Hessell Mortlock would approach, in his dark, best suit, and the monogrammed cuff-links, hooking his arm to his wife’s white arm, examining her, asking: ‘She’s doing well, isn’t she? Am I looking after her?’

Some of the women experienced a twinge on glimpsing the youthful situation which existed between the Mortlocks.

14

It was almost five years before Mrs Scudamore flew over to visit her daughter. One thing and another had intervened. There was Mummy’s Operation, for one, and then Dad spent a few months in That Home. During their separation Mrs Mortlock genuinely grieved for her ailing parents, and would have liked to go to them. She hardly dared tell herself the reason she didn’t.

‘I’m sure you won’t find her a nuisance,’ she told her husband as the visit became imminent. ‘I’ll drive her about and show her the different gardens. That is, when you’re not using the car.’

‘Why should I find her a nuisance?’ Hessell Mortlock asked.

There were moments when he took refuge in a pinker transparency of skin, in a completely shadowless blue stare, which made him less even than a boy. He was so assured in his innocence.

Mrs Scudamore came, and was different from what her daughter remembered. The enamel had cracked. She seemed to have shrunk, was older, naturally, and colder; she was always chafing her hands and talking of slipping a cardigan on. Upon seeing each other the two women proceeded to embrace, grappled almost, making little noises which a third person might have had difficulty in interpreting, but which they themselves understood perfectly. The daughter seemed to tower now above her shrivelled mother, to whom she longed to give something from her own excess.