I finished the cigarette just as Mrs Raffald arrived. She looked at me with exaggerated surprise, and I stubbed it out in a saucer.

‘You look as if you’d been doing that all your life,’ she said.

‘It isn’t difficult,’ I told her.

‘You’re not a smoker,’ she said, unbuttoning her coat and taking her hat off.

‘I used to be,’ I said. ‘I used to smoke as much as Lili.’

Mrs Raffald paused on her way to the broom-cupboard. ‘She smokes too much,’ she remarked. ‘You can smell her coming a mile off.’

Mrs Raffald and I enjoyed a cordial, even close, relationship. We understood each other.

‘My aunts all smoked until they died in old age,’ I said, remembering them. Elegant in age, smoke furling in the lamplight, they had talked and talked in the swift, clipped tones of their generation that would seem artificial now. It was strange to think of those days and their difference. There had been more noise, more bustle: even, it seemed, more light. But that was because there had been fewer lights—no electricity in the farm, gas-lighting in the streets—and so the light had had more significance, had shone more brightly. The street lamps in the road now cast a bland glow half prudish, half prurient. They said, ‘Nothing unseemly can go on under our regard, and if it does we will be watching.’ I remembered a time when I had walked home to the farm from the village because I had somehow missed the uncle sent to collect me. I had been to a music lesson and I hummed ‘Farewell Manchester’ until I reached the edge of the houses. It was pitch black beyond. I felt my way along the hedgerow, knowing that I must not stop and turn, for if I did I should have no idea which direction I was headed in. When I came to the moor I half walked, half crawled until I saw the lights of the farmhouse. It was both frightening and not frightening. There had been no marauders or footpads in the district since the previous century, but as I edged through that utter darkness I felt I would welcome the company of any other living thing—a wild animal, a murderer. Only when I saw the lights of home did normal apprehension return and the hairs on my neck rise as I heard a rustle in the marsh grass, breathing behind a low stone wall. When home is within reach, sheep become tigers and the swooping owl the assassin. I think it is hope which makes us cowards.

‘Well, don’t take it up again,’ advised Mrs Raffald, returning equipped with broom and dustpan and brush. ‘Not at your age.’

‘No,’ I said absently, for I was wondering why in total darkness there is nothing to fear but darkness. Then I thought about what she had said. ‘If you think about it,’ I observed, ‘this is the only sensible age to do anything dangerous.’