‘Do you remember,’ I asked Lionel tonight, ‘that afternoon years ago when you complimented me on my tennis?’ I reminded him of the maids bringing the lemonade and then remaining. He smiled obligingly, but clearly he has no memory for such occasions. I was in love myself that afternoon.

‘Lett’s have sent over these summer shirts,’ he said tonight, spreading them out on the kitchen table. He would take the first one, not even unfolding the others. I laughed at him and he laughed too. Together we choose two, both of them green, the colour that suits him best.

Mrs Rolleston sat in the armchair by her window, looking out over the sea at the dwindling lights of the town. On the dressing-table at the far end of the room a lamp burned beside an oval looking-glass, its light gleaming on her scent bottles and on the ivory backs of her hairbrushes.

I heard about the bridge, the letter she’d just opened informed her. Quite often she didn’t open the letters immediately, but put them aside until she’d gathered strength. That’s great for Corny but there is only sympathy in my heart for yourselves, the way things are. I wouldn’t ask you for it at a time like this but fifteen shillings in an envelope would be an act of charity. Only I had bad luck a week ago.

When the Black and Tans shot Dowley on the billiard-hall steps Kathleen Quigley had wept as inconsolably as Brigid had less than a month earlier. It would have been unthinkable to allow them to go on working side by side in the same kitchen, and in Brigid’s condition it would have been a cruelty to turn her out. ‘D’you understand?’ she said, but Kathleen Quigley had crossly shaken her head.

Mrs Rolleston rose and prepared herself for bed. As she washed she wondered if the woman managed to live on the money sent her. The letters sometimes mentioned the hens she kept, and they had also mentioned the death of her father and, some years later, of her mother. The Havertys had insisted at the time that Dowley would never have looked at a girl like Kathleen Quigley, that it was only her hopes that had been destroyed, not any kind of reality. There was never hard feelings on my side, all the letters ended. And never will be.