Clearly something momentous must have happened—Mrs Raffald did not habitually give my son orders—but I increasingly did not care what it was. I said, ‘Let’s have just one more drink’, and I wondered briefly what Monica would do with the baked meats—but baked meats were what you had at funerals. This was to have been a wedding. I fell asleep reflecting that while weddings could be definitely cancelled, funerals could only be postponed.

I never really knew exactly what had happened, although I remember Mrs Raffald uttering the word ‘summerhouse’, and experiencing a swift, hallucinatory image: a sense of déjà vu which would have rocked me back on my heels if I had not been sitting down. What she said, or hinted at, was not unexpected. I thought confusedly, ‘I know, I know, I saw them.’ Past and present were superimposed on each other, everything was repeated, nothing was new. Lili and Jack, Lili and Syl, Lili and all the devils in hell... Bless her. I never saw her again.

Syl refused to discuss the matter. He said there’d been a scene. They were all mad round there, and Margaret herself had turned out to suffer from religious mania. He said he was going to marry Miss Benson from the office.

‘Mrs Raffald,’ I said some time later, ‘did Lili...?’ But I didn’t really want to know. Details were unimportant and frequently distressing, and Mrs Raffald would not burden me with them. Anyway, perhaps I did know.

She said, ‘I’m not saying nothing. All I’m saying is she’ll never wear that hat again in public.’

And she laughed and laughed and laughed.

THE FLY IN THE OINTMENT

My coffee had gone cold. It looked, I thought, as though it had died, since it had a grey, inert appearance and only something dead could possibly go cold in such heat. I might have been thinking like this because I was reading the obituary column in an old copy of The Times in order to discourage other club members from coming to talk to me, and I was not yet old enough to be cheered by the deaths of strangers. Somebody stood up at a neighbouring table so I read the list of forthcoming marriages with an assumed intense interest, reflecting that strangers who were engaged to each other were even more boring than strangers who had died. Then I saw two names I recognized and immediately I looked up and around to see if there was anyone present who would remember Monica—someone who would appreciate how very peculiar, and indeed amusing, this announcement was. It was quite pointless. Nobody here had met Syl. Nobody here knew the circumstances of our past. Nobody here would be diverted to learn that Syl was going to marry Monica’s daughter unless I acquainted them with the facts and I couldn’t very well do that. I was already regarded as not quite. That was how the women put it: ‘Well, darling—Lili is very good company and all that, but she isn’t quite...’ And most of them wouldn’t trust their husbands alone with me. Nor could I tell my own husband the details of my last days in England. He was a tolerant man, but there are limits.