‘Because,’ said Lili patiently, ‘if it all came out, if somebody—anybody—talked about it, she’d think it was me. And she trusts me. I like being trusted. Besides,’ she added with patent honesty, ‘as I already knew what it was I wasn’t consumed with curiosity.’

‘What was it?’ I asked.

‘Not going to tell you,’ said Lili.

‘What are you making?’ I asked.

‘Flowers,’ said Lili, ‘for the wedding. For decoration. It’s a secret. Don’t tell.’

Without shame I felt helpless tears roiling down my cheeks. ‘Oh Lili,’ I said.

She didn’t get up, but leaned across and put her hand on mine. Her fingers were stained scarlet.

‘There won’t be a wedding,’ she promised.

For some reason I believed her: possibly because there was nothing else I could do. I was as weak and dispirited as a newborn child exposed on a river bank. I had seen a dead kingfisher once on a riverbank...

I couldn’t leave it alone. ‘But what can you do?’ I asked. I found I was thinking of Monica, of all her preparations, the trouble and expense. She spoke of it whenever I saw her.

‘It’s so late,’ I said. ‘We’ve left it too late.’

‘Some things,’ said Lili, ‘only happen at the very last minute. If you think about it everything happens at the last minute. Things don’t happen before they happen, do they?’

Although I found this quite senseless her tone was reassuring. Something out of the common was called for here and Lili was unlike most of human kind. She did not feel the normal constraints of accepted behaviour. She might do anything.

I went and got a bottle of whisky to reinforce the wisp of optimism I was experiencing and poured out two glasses full.

‘Wow,’ said Lili, ‘that’s more like it.’

It was now about ten in the morning and these days one glass of whisky made me drunk. I half-consciously wanted to rearrange the pattern of life, to ride across the boundaries which separated the done from the not-done thing. I felt it would make it easier for Lili to do something which normally was not done, and getting drunk on Scotch in the middle of the morning was not the accepted thing for old ladies in my environment.

Mrs Raffald, when she arrived, was noncommittal about this scene of mild debauchery. ‘Don’t overdo it’ was all she said.

‘I’d better be off,’ said Lili, gathering up her bits of paper and wire. ‘I’ll finish this in the summerhouse.’

Summerhouse. I laughed to myself and shook my head. Lili was incorrigible. Mrs Raffald made me sit, out of the way, in the drawing-room and I went to sleep. I slept a lot over the next few days and I drank a lot of Scotch as well. Perhaps I should have put that in reverse order.

Mrs Raffald came up to my bedroom carrying a tray of breakfast things: China tea, toast, coddled egg.