There is so little happens nowadays [she found]. So many people have gone away. It is sad to live in a town one no longer knows. Oh one thing, Anthea, you will be interested to hear. Doctor Flegg – you remember – who has been doing something nuclear, was given a fellowship by the Americans. He, too, will be going away, with his wife who won the competition. To Tennessee – is it? They have two young children, I am told – or perhaps three...

Mrs Mortlock was unable to share her mother’s interest in strangers. Only the image of that strange island in which, it seemed, almost the whole of her youth had been spent, disturbed her by returning through the mists of sleep, with a crying of gulls, and the milky sea, sucking at and troubling her ample breasts.

At least it was always morning after sleep, and as soon as she woke she would force herself out of the bed in which she might have been tempted to remain. She flung herself at activities now, whether the house-painting, or merely driving to the Centre to buy the vegetables, or, when the old one was finished, the next side of special-offer mutton. The ladies of the Mortlocks’ acquaintance – they never developed into anything else – smiled at one another and remarked: ‘So economical, she has his interests at heart.’ It was only the purely malicious who added: ‘He’ll see she doesn’t get the opportunity for anything else.’

She was devoted to her husband, to her home, and on a second occasion, but never again, surreptitiously, with exquisitely pained old movements, he slipped her a fiver. They did not discuss money after that.

As for Hessell Mortlock he was pleased enough to have supplied her needs, after he had recovered from the shock caused by direct approach and the general indiscretion of the situation. Women never understood the significance of money. Women he had known – mind you, he was not in any way accusing Anthea – but he had known other women hack into capital as though it were only a material matter, as though they were not also involving themselves morally by such an act.

Hessell Mortlock went less than before to the factory to catch out the manager who was running it. Not that he would have derived less pleasure from the discovery of dishonesty – it was simply that the physical strength had begun to trickle out of him. Nothing alarming, or noticeable, yet. He hoped. He could still get himself up in his suits, and present to the world a fine figure of a man, and cock his leg at the ladies as he stood with a plateful of chicken à la King. At such times his wife would grow proud again of her distinguished, elderly husband. His thinning, his silvery hair filled her with love and pathos.

For Mrs Mortlock had learnt the way of happiness which her mother had practised before her. She ordered her life – dared it perhaps, in any case kept a firm hand on any of the loose bits which might fly out and hit her in the eye. She was fortunate indeed in having her health, her strength, to buoy her up. Even in the old, patched, paint-splattered slacks she wore about her husband’s hoovered house and gardenful of polished shrubs, she was not without a physical magnificence. On winter afternoons she became almost conscious of it herself as she bore down the grassy slope to give her husband a message, or assure herself that all was well. How the blood rushed through her firm flesh, daunting the atmosphere; the warmed air returned to rub against her like a swath of furs she didn’t own.