Mrs Custance saw something must be done at once. Desperation helped her to remember that she knew somebody, who knew somebody, who knew a bishop. So the matter was arranged with greater speed.

‘Miss Docker,’ she announced, when it could no longer be avoided; it sounded almost savage to Mrs Custance herself, ‘we have decided, Mr Custance and I’ – because she needed some support – ’that at our time of life, we are too set in our ways, too selfish perhaps, to share our home with a third person. It is dreadful, I know, dreadful,’ Mrs Custance said quite honestly.

But Miss Docker smiled, as if she knew, as if from the very beginning she had known.

‘People,’ she said, ‘cannot help theirselves.’

But broke into a shapeless sobbing.

Mrs Custance launched at once into a deplorable, but necessary, recitative:

‘You know what a privilege it is to enter the Sundown Home at Sarsaparilla. You should just see the waiting list. Many of them well-connected couples. Single ladies too.’

Nothing would restrain Mrs Custance now. She might always have been playing that game.

‘Well, to cut it short, a friend, or acquaintance, has spoken to Bishop Agnew, and the Home has decided to accept you, overlooking prior claims.’

Miss Docker had stopped her crying. It had been of a mercifully dry variety.

‘Will Thursday suit?’ she asked.

So, on the Thursday, the hire car arrived, together with the little van, to fetch those few oddments, how long or how soon after her arrival neither Mrs Custance nor Miss Docker herself was prepared to calculate.

‘I will not speechify,’ Miss Docker said, ‘only to say that Christian kindness is a rare thing, and never too easy learned, even by those of other virtue. Well, dear, you will gather I am grateful, though not one to make a mouthful of it. Okay, Fred,’ she said, ‘drive on in this lovely car, which you have spat on extra hard, I see. For me. Some men claim that face powder. Ordinary face powder. Did you know?’

So Miss Docker was driven away to the Sundown Home at Sarsaparilla.

‘It is only next door! We shall be neighbours!’ Mrs Custance called.

‘Well?’ asked her husband when he came home from work.

‘It is done,’ she said.

She might have been the serpent. Or Lady Macbeth.

Already he breathed more freely. He loved her for it. She was so thin, but he loved her even for her salt-cellars.

Then Ted Custance did an extraordinary thing. With the flat of his hand, he began to beat up the bob of his wife’s brittle, neutral-coloured hair. His arm rising as though by levitation, he beat and beat, ever so lightly, till the hair fanned out and stood on end.

‘Ted! Oh, Ted!’ she cried and protested. ‘Whatever would people say?’

Laughing.

He flopped down silent then, on the broken springs of the kitchen chair, and she was drawn towards him till caught between his thighs. Silence made it seem natural enough: her familiar knees, the rough material of his trousers – though on looking out through the green gloom of staked tomatoes, they saw the daylight accusing them, and Mrs Custance, for one, suspected she must always stand condemned in any trial by goodness.