‘She keeps a boarding-house,’ another voice said, but Tom was unable to ascertain who was speaking because he couldn’t see around a clump of bamboo canes. It might be Mrs Commodium, he thought, because the voice was what you’d expect from her: gruff and heavy. Mrs Commodium was a statuesque woman who moved very slowly down South Main Street, calling in at the shops and ordering goods to be sent to her house. Once, in Meath’s, Tom had heard two other women agreeing that she had driven her husband to his grave. Tom remembered seeing Mr Commodium in his lifetime, a man with a dog on a lead.

‘But what on earth is she doing here?’ someone else enquired, sounding like the woman who’d asked him to show her the place his father had been killed.

‘He visits her, you know. You could set your clocks by him.’ Tom heard a gasp, and an effort at speech failing, another effort made and again failing. ‘Oh, indeed he does,’ the voice he guessed to be Mrs Commodium’s insisted. ‘Everyone knows that.’

The conversation drifted away from Tom, the voices unintelligibly continuing for a moment longer. He slipped through the shrubbery, making his way to another edge of it. ‘Tom!’ he heard Mrs Rolleston calling, and then he saw her on the delphinium lawn. ‘Patty, tell Tom I want him,’ she said as Patty went by with a jug of lemonade he had watched being made in the kitchen.

He ran out on to the short grass of the lawn, pursuing Mrs Rolleston, who had passed into the house. In the dining-room he said:

‘I’m here, Mrs Rolleston.’

Apart from the sculleries and the kitchen, his mother didn’t allow him to go into any room of the house unless he was sent on a message, but he knew it was all right to be in the dining-room because Mrs Rolleston wanted him. She didn’t hear him at first so he repeated her name more loudly. She turned round just as she was about to pass through the door to the inner hall.

‘Tom, would you do something for me?’

She paused the way she did when she asked him to buy a postal order, not taking it for granted that he’d agree before he said so. He liked her the best of them, Tom thought.

‘I will, Mrs Rolleston,’ he said.

‘Tom, after lunch, will you show the children places to hide? Make them play a game of hide-and-seek.’

He nodded, although he felt shy at the thought of approaching the children.

‘And make sure you get your own lunch in the kitchen, Tom.’