I had been to the funeral of Mrs Raffald’s mum, but not to the baked meats afterwards. This was because in those days I had grown too far from the ways and customs of my youth and had forgotten how to appreciate people with no pretence. I had thought I would feel awkward with Mrs Raffald’s relations who shouted their wares from barrows, cleaned windows and drove taxi-cabs for a living. I had thought they would feel uneasy with me, but now I remembered all the time I had spent in the kitchen and the dairy with the people who belonged there and how I had belonged there too. Margaret had never known that security. She had been brought up by a shallow, ambitious and pretentious woman in a precarious, silk-lined vacuum and never really felt the earth under her feet at all. Perhaps her mother had done her as much harm as ... But I didn’t want to think about that.

‘Perhaps she should go away for a while...Margaret…’ I said.

‘She’s been away,’ said Mrs Raffald, ‘and she’s come back more limp than she went.’

I don’t know whether it was because of what I had been told, and that I saw Margaret in a different light of my own kindling, or whether she really was changing, but whatever the reason something was different. She was drinking a lot for one thing. In those days I believe people drank more than they do now—some people anyway—and I think it was those who had got into the habit in the East. Monica, I am certain, would never have splashed around the alcohol in the way she did if she hadn’t grown accustomed to a way of life in which her compatriots drank more or less all the time. I remembered from my brief stay in Egypt that even the innocent-seeming long drinks were habitually spiked with gin.

Margaret, I felt, did not drink to be sociable, nor even to get drunk, but because the drink was there on offer and she had discovered almost by mistake that it made the days seem shorter and more tolerable. If anyone had reproved her I think she would have abandoned it, but even Monica seemed to see no real harm in what she doubtless thought of as convivial drinking. I never saw Margaret stumble or laugh without reason or flushed with drink, but I saw her eyes go slightly out of focus and watched her not listening—away somewhere on her own. Once or twice I wondered where.

‘What are you thinking about?’ I asked her one evening—out of curiosity, not in order to make conversation.

‘Oh nothing,’ she said, but the smile she gave me could only be described as mocking, and it was very unlike Margaret’s usual style. I persevered.