This, said Willy, is Kitty.

He offered it to the room, on to which the door gave, no more at first to the intruder than a suggestion of firelight and firelight reflected in a silver kettle. There was much silver. Candles in silver candlesticks behind their glass shades.

How do you do, Miss Goose ?

It had the high, harsh tone of an Englishwoman defending the formalities. They touched hands. Somewhere another voice, a man’s, veering into welcome. She had ceased to exist for herself, for anybody, whether accepting a cup, or giving an answer when asked for one.

Mrs Standish spoke about her sons, of which she had three. They were not so much personalities as her sons. These she had given to the Army, the Navy, and the Law. The Law, who was present, stood with the smile of an elder brother for a younger’s indiscretion, and she could feel his smile. It was indulgent, in-the-know.

Lord Stockbridge, said Mrs Standish, marshalling the conversation, is putting down a thousand partridges.

She offered this on a charger to Kitty Goose. Willy offered tea. His breath swept down from time to time, a breeze from a distant and more temperate zone. But nothing to oppose to the partridges, to any of the foreign idiom through which she picked, together with the fragments of cake.

They rattled like pebbles, the released words.

No, she said, no. Or: Yes, yes.

Out of the twilight and the glow off reddish curtains, chair-backs formed their scrolls. There was the portrait of an admiral. Additional faces added their features to the actual scene, the nameless Colonel, gathering crumbs from his waistcoat, the small, indeterminate man who was Willy’s father, who spoke to her of shooting and of daffodils. He had warm, dry, apologetic hands, and suffered from knowing that he bored his sons.

Goose was a queer sort of name, the Colonel said. From what did it derive ?

Mrs Standish uneasily supposed it was just another East Anglian name. An exasperated hand poured a saucer of tea for her little dog.

It was pretty much tenterhooks, with Willy swallowing too much cake too quickly. If you hadn’t been nervous, you could have enjoyed the irony of comparison, this and the tea that would be starting soon at home, the cod balls and cold Sunday roast, and Father arranging his moustache in the cup, with an almost mystical concentration, his eyes distant in a steam of tea. But nervously she shrugged this off, trying to impress, if not in words, by her graceful silences or a well-timed smile.

Mrs Standish began to talk neighbours with the Colonel.

There was a continuous tension between Willy’s mother and herself. The woman’s face, her voice, gave her no loophole. Her breast rose steeply, unimpressionable, with an old Flemish brooch pinned to a slate-coloured dress. She was grey and distant, the flashing rings, the drooped lid. And her teeth seized a word and worried it. There was a perpetual killing of words, as if someone in particular might stoop to pick one up, and use it in desperate reply. One of the words peculiar to her own existence, or one of the names that must remain names.