‘Gee!’ Marcus Furfield was reminded. ‘Did you hear that breezer Doctor Flegg let out, while they were washing-up? It shook the whole kitchen.’

Doctor Flegg squatted down, and began offering bread to darkness. He told Anthea about a winter he had spent at the point, after an illness, alone except for a roof full of possums.

‘There was one old girl,’ he said, ‘you would have thought somebody was emptying a quart jug on the ceiling every time she made water.’

Anthea decided to accept coarseness as part of the situation, but did pause to wonder what Mummy, as she copied her companion’s attitude, and squatted. Her smile, her dress was unnaturally tight, while sufficiently adapted, she hoped. Anyway, in the darkness, nobody would be able to see.

‘What did you do that winter, here, alone, after you had been ill?’

Barry Flegg had not expected to rouse interest.

‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Lay about, and watched the sea. I was too weak at first for anything else. Later on, when I got back my strength, I found I just wanted to look at things I hadn’t ever noticed before.’

The little boys had wandered off. The young man’s voice, separated from his hitherto obtrusive body, surprised her by its intimate, its gentle tone. She had never cared for the name ‘Barry’. In the darkness, apparently, he had continued offering crusts while speaking, for the immediate neighbourhood was moving and clutching. She suddenly felt a cold claw grasping at a crust she held in her hand as a token of what they had come there for.

‘Oh!’

‘What?’

‘I didn’t expect! I nearly toppled over!’

Anthea Scudamore wobbled, and giggled most foolishly, she heard. But it frightened away the animal’s too human claw, and secretly she was glad.

‘It was only a possum.’

It was only a man’s, flat ordinary voice, but trying to help her, she realized, and his hand, to keep her balance. Along her arm she felt the man’s rather shaggy arm, which she had noticed already by lamplight with unresolved feelings. Nor did she wish now to explore a sensation which had begun to affect her too closely. At least there were only possum witnesses of her engagement in the musky darkness with this hard, human body, which, she had been taught, it must be her duty to resist.

In the moments of her indecision she heard her shrill, unnatural voice: ‘If I came here alone I should probably explore. And collect things. Shells and things. Seaweed. Plants. Make little collections.’

Never before had she considered anything of the kind. Though her wobble was now more controlled, thanks to the clamp of Barry Flegg’s hairy hand, she knew her voice sounded absurdly unconvincing. Instead, she should have dared tell him: This afternoon I lay on the Indian counterpane, and my real, secret self was half-waiting for a door to open – but quickly. It was exciting, and perfectly ghastly, at the same time.

Perhaps a good thing that one of her legs was shooting with pins and needles. Then she was deafened by the telephone.