This was really annoying. Marie Claire had always cheated. She’d have aides-mémoire painted in henna on her arms under her long sleeves and on her legs up to where her socks stopped. I had sometimes cheated too when I could be bothered, but I had never cared about exam results in the way the others did. Monica didn’t cheat. She swotted. She’d been a stupid girl in many ways. I said, ‘What I said was—she didn’t have any sense.’ Monica looked at me as though she found me ridiculous. Any minute now I should find myself squabbling as I’d squabbled at school and I lit a cigarette and breathed deeply. I must not allow myself to be drawn into an undignified wrangle. Dinner had been more or less all right, the beds were soft and the rooms warm. I must behave like a grateful and courteous guest, not an undisciplined schoolgirl—no matter how maddening Monica could be, and I was beginning to remember just how maddening that was.

‘You always did talk frightful nonsense,’ she said to me in a tone half-reproving, half-indulgent. I was speechless.

Suddenly Margaret spoke. ‘She was daft,’ she said, and in the twinkling of an eye I saw the child in a different light. Not only did it appear that she held convictions of her own—she held the correct convictions. I reminded myself again how unwise it was to leap to conclusions before a proper period of observation, and I regarded her closely for the first time with these new eyes.

‘How you can say that’, said Monica to her daughter, ‘when Marie Claire was so good to you, I really can’t imagine.’ She spoke of the ingratitude of guests and I was glad I’d held my tongue earlier. She was really cross. She was cross with me; but just as the good guest cannot roar at her hostess, no more can the good hostess roar at the guest, so she was taking it out on Margaret. Now that I was looking at Margaret properly I saw that she was not as ordinary as I had thought. Not quite. She didn’t answer her mother, not—I thought—because she was afraid to, but because she knew it would be a waste of time and energy. She had bones and features and she sat still.