When we reached the top of the stairs, I showed her into our drawing room, which looked to me for an instant like a junk shop. She sat down in one of the chairs belonging to the three-piece suite which had come, as they say, with the house. It was a respectable piece of furniture, and I wished I had not draped it in a piece of red velour which had once been one of my father’s study curtains. She did look so exactly the same as she had always looked that I wondered why I had not thought of her remark first. She had light brown, naturally curly hair and one of those small-featured, smiling faces which are thought tremendously pretty at school, in one’s home town and on the Continent, and she had not altered by a hair or a wrinkle. She wore a little powder on her nose, a little pale pink and very nice lipstick and a yellow-and-grey check skirt with a grey jersey.

“Well, Mary,” I said, “what a surprise to see you. After all this time.”

“I thought my parents told you that I might be dropping in.

“They did say I might be seeing you, but you know how it is, how one says things—it must be years since we saw each other. How long is it now? Six years?”

“I suppose it must be.” She did not bashfully exclaim at the sound of those six years, but my heart shrank.

“I haven’t seen you,” I said, “since you were in your first year at university. Do you remember that day we met in London? We went to see some film or other. What was it that we went to see? Wasn’t it Olivier’s Hamlet? I’m sure it was, I remember thinking that it was quite frightful.”

“I’ve no idea,” she said. “I never remember things like that. You always had a good memory.”

“That’s true.”

I started to rock myself gently backwards and forwards on the rocking chair on which I was sitting; I was almost overcome by this strange and skeletal indictment. For it was true: I always had had a good memory.

“And now you’re married,” I said, for the want of anything better to say. “I don’t think your parents told me what your husband’s name was.”

“Summers. Henry Summers.”

“So now you’re Mrs. Summers? Mary Summers. That’s a very nice name. A lot better than mine. Emma Evans I ended up, you know.”

I pulled a face, but she did not like me to care about names, and perhaps in any case the lack of euphony did not strike her.

“We used to talk at school,” she said, “about when we would get married. If we would get married. Do you remember? And Mummy told me that you had two children. I never used to picture you with children, somehow.”