It was an uneasy feeling. There were many uneasy feelings in the house, in the first stages of falling asleep. You changed your side again and again. The sighs were white as moonlight that the wardrobe released. The footfall lay on the carpet black as velvet. And downstairs Connie Tiarks crumbled into marble atoms on the sofa.

Downstairs Connie Tiarks curled, frightened, catlike, in a fixed line. She dared not uncurl a hand, move a leg, now that she had finished crying. The clock had pillars before they turned out the light. She had fixed her eyes on the familiar face, because any clock is the same face, and remembered the little leather travelling clock of her mother’s that was a wedding present, she said. Thinking of her mother made her whimper past her pillow, into the plush arm of the sofa that Mrs Macarthy had pushed back. There were also the travelling photographs of her father, one in uniform, and one in a knickerbocker suit. The warmth and familiarity of her own possessions made her shudder again, remembering the scene in the bedroom. Her life, as she waited for sleep, seemed to open into an avenue of unfamiliar misery, that sleep itself protracted in a fretful journeying from place to place. She was afraid. She was uncomfortable. She was dissolving in a rain of hot, pervading misery.

It was the dining-room sofa that became the unshakable cross of Connie Tiarks. Even after they moved her to the room with the pincushion bulging from the china shoe, and where it was some comfort to wake against the trellis of puce roses. Eden could always remember the sofa, when others forgot, At breakfast or at dinner, even with her back to this memorial, Connie was reminded in Eden’s eyes. Mrs Macarthy had said it was most provoking, and such a big girl. But Eden pursed up her mouth and looked. Or at times she said coldly, when she wanted her way: Who wet the sofa, Connie, I wonder who it could have been? This made you hot and sticky. It made you almost do it again. There was no escaping what was almost a lily, flowering in a field of plush.

Connie Tiarks was the weak sort. She would always be the weak sort. Soon she learned to bear this. And there were the sheltered moments too, the moments of placid sensation, sucking a chocolate bar, the sun on bricks, waking and drowsing, waking and drowsing before anyone took command.

Let’s play at war, Eden said.

It made Connie quail.

I’ll be the English, Elyot said.

No, said Eden. I’ll be the English.

All right, he said. I’ll be the French.

Wasps were heavy in the trees. A breeze ran in a light shiver over the crest of grass.

Who’ll be the Germans? Eden asked.

As if she didn’t already know. Her voice hung lazily inquiring. A wasp dug into a yellow pear.

I’ll be the Germans, Connie sighed.

Her hands became green, twisting grass.