Lili’s cigarette smoke went down the wrong way. ‘Nobody ever married anyone because he was virtuous,’ she protested. Then she recanted. ‘Yes they did. What nobody ever did was go to bed with someone because he was virtuous.’

My mother looked annoyed and inclined to dispute this but, naturally, she couldn’t. What could she say?

There was still so much I didn’t understand. The revelations of evil that I had experienced had brought me only to confusion and powerlessness. I remembered a night by the river when daylight faded, darkness fell and the moon rose at once with a new light and I thought I understood everything and that everything was good. Now I knew myself to be bad in a bad world, a vessel of poison afloat in a sea of poison, and I thought that this was all there was to know.

‘We have to go into town,’ said Lili. ‘I’m going to take Margaret with us.’

I protested. I wanted only to go down to the summerhouse and watch the leaves falling until night fell with them.

‘You go,’ said my mother decisively. ‘It’ll do you good.’

That was that, for if I now refused my mother would see to it that I regretted my foolishness.

‘What are you going to wear?’ asked Lili.

‘Wear your grey tweed,’ advised my mother. ‘You look nice in that.’

‘Let me look,’ said Lili. ‘I adore other people’s wardrobes.’

She looked through my chest-of-drawers after she had decided that the grey tweed would do.

‘Haven’t you got a grey jumper?’ she inquired. ‘How elegant you would look all in grey—like a little nun.’

Elegance was not a concept I associated with myself, nor with nuns, but as I thought about it I realized that Lili was right. The sisters had indeed looked most neat and lovely in their colourless habits, stark against the brightness of the country.

‘She should wear a red jumper,’ objected my mother. ‘A nice colourful contrast.’

‘No, no,’ said Lili. ‘That is a very English notion and quite misplaced. I shall lend her a jumper. She shall go all in grey and you shall lend her your seed pearls. Now a pale lipstick and some powder and she can slip into Bond Street without looking as though she came from Croydon.’

‘She does come from Croydon,’ said my mother.

‘There is no need for her to look as though she does,’ said Lili.

My mother in her mustard-coloured coat and skirt, with a green jumper for her nice colourful contrast, looked minutely offended but wasn’t sufficiently interested in clothes to argue the matter further. ‘She’ll look very drab,’ was all she said.

Lili brushed my hair with a brush wrapped in a silk scarf and pinched my upper lip to refine the line of lipstick.

‘You must never underestimate the power of clothes,’ she said. ‘Clothes are the person. Take away the clothes and you take away the personality. Naked people are nothing. You wouldn’t recognize me if you met me in the bath.’