‘You should invest in a transistor,’ she would call through.

‘We don’t need to!’ Ted Custance had once gone so far as shouting back at the dark.

But Miss Docker did not hear. There was an awful lot she did not hear.

‘Ah, the lovely music!’ she called. ‘It does you good. And talks. Educational. Though what I go for most of all is the man who says good-night. Always so friendly.’

The Custances lay in rigid alignment in their bed. He would pinch up the skin along her arm with the tips of his rather rough fingers.

Long before the Epilogue, with those vibrant voices and English accents which did things to Mrs Custance in normal circumstances, Miss Docker was sucked under. The Custances lay and listened to the surf roaring into the caverns of sleep.

Then, to synchronize with the time pips, Ted Custance would nip the skin of his wife’s arm with precise, but quite brutal bravado.

Till Mrs Custance dragged away her arm. The Presence would have allowed her very little respite from guilt.

One Sunday Miss Docker had an admission to make. They had fetched her from church, where she sang in the choir; the Custances were vaguely Baptist.

‘That woman,’ she said, casually, for this was not yet her admission, ‘that Miss Scougall has something against me. She cannot bear that I should improve on my part. She is all the sopranos rolled into one. She won’t admit that anyone else might be artistic. And of course her sister sides with her. She plays flat.’

Each of the Custances was toying absently with the last of the apple Betty. They were exhausted, but no longer destructible. Perhaps, by now, they had learnt to withdraw far enough.

When Miss Docker stopped munching, and leaned forward, and announced quite ominously, the beige powder trembling on her darker jowls:

‘There is something that has been grieving me.’

The Custances returned at once, knowing they must suffer a blow.

‘For some time,’ Miss Docker said, ‘I have wondered why, amongst good friends, there seems to be a ban on Christian names.’

Ted Custance could have been warding it off.

‘I was christened Gertrude,’ Miss Docker told. ‘But everybody calls me Gee. Gee would feel she really was your friend to hear her name occasionally.’

Mrs Custance hung her head.

‘I expect we are not that kind,’ she confessed. ‘We are not exactly cold people, not formal in any way, but stiff’ – here she made the greatest effort – ‘yes, I suppose, too, we are shy.’

‘A name is friendship’s sweetener,’ Miss Docker coaxed.

Mr Custance was sweating.

‘I’m buggered if I will!’ he said, very quiet, and quickly went outside.

Miss Docker did not seem to hear.

‘Ah well, it was only a suggestion,’ she said. ‘Nemo will remain nemo. That means nobody.’

When Mrs Custance went in search of her husband, she found him pinching out the tomato shoots instead of starting his Sunday nap. But cool by now. She noticed the green reflexions on his skin. They were both splotched with patches of green, both cool people. Not that this precluded passion. It meant, rather, that each needed identical, cool, greenish flesh to twine around. Their leaves opened only to silence.