Lili showed very little bitterness when she spoke of how her family’s wealth had been taken away, and I admired her for this. I didn’t lose this feeling of admiration even when I understood that, by various shifts and devices, much of her family had contrived to retain much of its riches. Things were not and never would be the same. She had an insouciance which I do not think I should have been capable of in her circumstances. There had been bred in my bones a respect, almost a love, for property which would have made it impossible for me to accept with so little complaint the appropriation of land which belonged to me. By property I mean only land. Other possessions left me cold. If, when I was a girl, the farmhouse had been forcibly taken from us I would have fought and killed to keep it. Now it no longer mattered. The course of life had separated me from my land and it was no longer mine. In truth it never had been. I had never held the deeds to it, after all, but it had belonged to me because I belonged to it. I had felt, like a peasant, that I needed it for sustenance and for identity; but I had drifted away, and now I was nobody but old Mrs Monro, living nowhere but in a meaningless house surrounded by spotted laurels. I told myself that it was probably intensely good for my soul: as was the reluctant esteem which I felt for Lili’s seemingly spontaneous renunciation of what had been hers.

***

I still liked to do my own shopping. Most of the tradesmen called at the house, but sometimes I would find an excuse to go to the shops. I needed some exercise and I detested walking in Croydon unless I had an aim in view. I walked slowly, masochistically reminding myself of the times when I had run over the moors and down the lanes. So long ago. All I knew of history seemed fresher and more immediate than my own youth. Ann Bullen, poor girl, and Mary Queen of Scots, and Margaret of York who was pressed to death under slabstones for refusing to renege on her faith—I could visualize them, soft-skinned and damp with fear as death faced them—but my own youthful self had disappeared into the past, not come with me to my present state. It was as though, at some point, I had been reinvented—an old woman to take the place of the young one. Did I envy those dead girls? Or had Margaret of York come into my head to remind me of my Margaret, and why did I think of her as mine when I did not, to be frank, really much care for her? And why was I walking to the butcher when my hips ached? Silly old woman.