It was true. There were, and Monica was far from the worst amongst them. Mrs Trevelyan from The Cedars, for instance, was a poisonous bitch with an entirely tenuous grasp of current reality. No, Monica was not too bad.

‘The Colonial experience,’ I said aloud, ‘had a bad effect on the English underbred.’

Mrs Raffald agreed. She said she didn’t know how the poor natives had taken it, but when people like Mrs Trevelyan came back and tried it on with her she soon let them know where they got off.

When she’d finished sweeping the drawing-room I made us both a cup of coffee and I thought about the woman who had worked in my uncles’ dairy and had smoked a pipe. She was called Marge, and she called all of us, even the eldest uncle, by our Christian names. I had had maids since then, and native servants when Jack did a stint in Egypt, and they had all made me uneasy. Northern blood does not adapt easily to an atmosphere of voluptuousness, of servility and craft—and all these things are present, in no matter how small a degree, in the type of master-servant relationship which Mrs Raffald and I were presently engaged in denigrating.

‘Lili’s all right,’ said Mrs Raffald as she drank her coffee. ‘She shows off a bit, but not so’s anyone would mind.’

I couldn’t dispute this. I was no longer angry with Lili. Jack was dead.

I sometimes found it strange to realize how little effect the vast cataclysms of existence have on those of us who are not too directly inconvenienced by them. The war for instance. Jack had been too old for active service and was given a job in one of the Ministries, which kept him employed and out of the way and allowed him the additional excitement of fire-watching from the roof when the bombing was at its height; while Syl was unfit. It transpired at his medical examination that his heart was weakened, probably by an undiagnosed attack of rheumatic fever when he was a child. That was possibly the worst fright I had throughout the war. Extraordinarily enough, I knew no one who had lost either a husband or a son and what I remember chiefly about those years is discomfort rather than fear or horror. We had the air-raid shelter dug in the garden, but when I was alone I never bothered to use it. Jack was away most nights—possibly fire-watching, probably not—and when the siren went I would settle in the blacked-out dining-room on a temporary divan bed with a book and a bottle and a supply of candles in case the electricity failed. I had an irrational feeling that I would prefer to sleep downstairs and let the house fall in on me than sleep in the bedroom and come down with the house. Syl was away most of the time working out ciphers and codes, I believe, at some secret place in the country. He never spoke about it. He was out of the front line and I hardly worried. I joined the WVS and I knitted socks for sailors, and I conceived the same hatred as the rest of my countrymen for the sign of the somersaulting child, the swastika. I dealt not at all with the black market, and very little ‘under the counter’, and I never breached the black-out rules or wasted a single crust of bread. When the war was over we filled in the air raid shelter and built the rockery over it, and as the years went by the only time I thought about the war was when I realized that butter and cream were unrationed and I could swim in them if I liked. I am ashamed of this remoteness: not because, like some idiotic folk I have met, I feel guilty because I did not suffer, but because it seems that only suffering can impress events on our minds and consciousness and this makes us seem paltry.