But his wife, he could just see, had continued standing in the position in which she had been abandoned.

‘They never ought to telegraph it,’ he protested. ‘You can’t undo anything by telegraphing. And you can adjust yourself if you hear decently, by letter.’

Or let someone else adjust.

But his wife’s obscure figure appeared permanently arrested.

Mrs Mortlock would have been unable to do or say anything for anyone, least of all for her father, with whom she had not succeeded, and now would never succeed, in communicating.

The image of her mother, swimming out of darkness and the islands of material possessions amongst which both had hoped to escape, suddenly merged with herself in a common wretchedness.

‘I shall have to go,’ she whimpered, ‘home.’

If it had not been for the dark, her broad shoulders might have looked grotesque.

‘What am I going to do?’ he complained, but succeeded in transposing his querulousness into a lower key. ‘I mean, when a woman accepts a husband, it isn’t to down tools and fly off half across Australia the minute something unpleasant happens.’

But I am not flying away from unpleasantness, she almost answered, only at the final instant her tongue resisted what might, after all, be true.

She remained for a little, crying softly, crouched in a wicker chair, until she remembered the sister-in-law she still hadn’t met.

‘Perhaps your sister would come to look after you while I’m away.’

‘Grace isn’t good for an emergency. Not again. Anyway, that’s how she put it last time I saw her.’

Although Mrs Mortlock had stopped crying there was hardly silence in the obliterated sun-room; it was full of the protests of wicker, and the old man’s breathing.

‘And how,’ he continued truculently, ‘how am I to know you’ll come back to me?’

She could not bring herself to answer that.

Seeing that he had subdued her, he tapped her on the knee, and proposed with a fatherly thoughtfulness: ‘I’m going to put the jug on. And see about getting us a meal. We’re the ones who have to go on living.’

It was never good policy to make the peace.

And Mrs Mortlock continued to do the things which were expected. Her mother wrote at last in detail. Dad, to humiliate her as never before, had taken his life one wet evening in the yard of the Black Bull. If the daughter’s feelings remained unexpressed, it was perhaps because, in her chilled condition, she dared not submit herself to the unpredictable terrors of grief. She was now at all times numb, at moments pinched and snuffly. Otherwise silent. And in that silence, little tremors of suffering seemed to reach out to her, from amongst the furniture, from far past occasions.

In the course of it all she went one day to the writing-desk and deliberately found the photograph of Brenda. The pearl earrings, the kiss-curl and unsteady cupid’s bow treated the face, almost archaic, to a brutality which no longer seemed hilarious.