‘I know,’ I said. I knew that Mrs Raffaid undoubtedly had views of her own about the forthcoming wedding. I was certain that she found it as incongruous as I now found it myself—inexplicable and absurd—and I wanted to talk to her about it. She was the only person in my life with whom I had anything in common at all. She was solid and unpretentious and she didn’t give a damn what people thought. I forgot that I had felt myself to be like Lili and Margaret. Perhaps I was, but there was no comfort in the reflection and nothing to be gained from it. What was needed here was the middle-aged quality of common sense. As a girl I had been good and I had had some wisdom, but it had been dissipated by time. Realizing that I had grown old only to grow worse, I felt an immense frustration. Impotence and a weary disinclination ever to do anything again flooded my limbs and I put the cup down before I dropped it. All I longed for was peace and an absence of all feeling: dull death with no prospect of immortality and whatever it might hold. I was too tired even to wish for happiness.

‘Right,’ said Mrs Raffald, ‘I think it’s back to bed with you.’

I found I was trembling.

‘This bloody wedding,’ she said. ‘You’ve been overdoing it, gallivanting all over the place, up all night with that Lili. You’re no spring chicken, you know. It’ll be the death of you, this wedding.’ She went on grumbling as I got back into bed.

‘Mrs Raffald,’ I said, ‘this wedding is ridiculous.’

‘I know, I know,’ she said. ‘Don’t you worry your head about it. It’ll be all right. You’ll see.’

I lay against the pillows thinking how undignified the neighbours would consider my conduct and my conversation with the charwoman, and how much I valued her. Without her, I reflected, I would be insupportably lonely. I had always heard that old age was a time of loneliness and it had never perturbed me, since I had imagined that what was meant was a physical separation from one’s fellows. Old people who lived alone, cut off by distance, or senility, or simple crabbedness, were lonely—not me. I had kept myself to myself from choice and I had never understood until now that loneliness was not imposed from outside but had bred and spread in me until I had become its host, and little else. I had not realized until now that I was lonely.

‘My Mum overdid it,’ said Mrs Raffald. ‘She was always on the go until I had her to live with me.’