‘Anthea,’ she would call, ‘do see whether there is an egg for Daddy, and run down to the corner for a dozen if there isn’t. I have my appointment at ten.’

Slight acquaintances might have wondered whether Bill Scudamore existed at all, though they heard about him, and read the headings of those unreadable leaders in the Clarion, and his hats were on the pegs in the passage outside the downstairs lavatory. Mrs Scudamore’s close friends, who knew that everything was above board, remembered him as a wry, skinny, silent man, who rose late, and breakfasted principally off newspapers. Late in the afternoon he would dawdle down to the Clarion office, and return to a refrigerator phase of life after others had gone to bed. Mentally he appeared to exist on political abstractions and a convincedly pessimistic attitude to all human endeavour. This, together with his ‘hours,’ meant that he was not missed by his wife’s friends, who knew that life is what you make it, and whose paths lay between its brightly-enamelled, concrete details.

Mrs Scudamore, who was puzzled, not to say distressed by nonconformity of any description, dismissed it from her mind whenever it affected her closely. So she assured herself: Bill cannot be unhappy. Temporarily, perhaps, she was right. Her husband suffered more from foreboding and irritations, the kind begotten by President Soekarno and ingrown toe-nails, or the egg he spilled on his dressing-gown. Anthea would boil him his egg before going off to one of her courses, and as Bill Scudamore took the knife, and scraped off the spot of offending egg, it would sometimes sadly occur to him: There goes Anthea, and again I haven’t thought what to say. Regret would ripen into guilt, until he remembered her mother, who took so much upon herself. Anthea would be taken care of.

‘Anything more, Dad, before I go?’ his daughter – his daughter – might call from the end of the veranda.

She was so bright, so thoughtful, so damn pleasant. She had learnt it all. Squinting through the glare of the veranda Bill Scudamore thought to see Betsy, or at least the wax which still had to be worked up into the replica. Some men, he understood, allowed themselves to experience twinges of renewal or desire on recognizing the past in the present, but his was a disbelieving nature, and this, surprisingly, his child. The white wax which sense of duty was moulding into a smile. This greenish, girlish flesh under a large summer hat. It made him examine his own hands.

Mrs Scudamore once said to Mrs Vesey who was known as her great friend: ‘It is thrilling to watch the blossoming of a young girl, particularly when she happens to be one’s daughter. One’s very own act of creation.’

There were moments when Mrs Scudamore suspected she was verging on the intellectual. That sort of thing was permissible provided one took care not to become involved with intellectuals. Seeing so little of her husband, she forgot to count him, and as for the Tullochs, now that they had hove in sight property reconciled her to their aberrations of the mind.