I went to see Mrs Monro. She was refreshing. I couldn’t imagine how she’d managed to be the wife and mother of those two men. Not that it’s all that unusual. I have known several rather magnificent women with the most hopeless husbands and sons. I suppose they seem even more hopeless beside their magnificent woman. I wondered how people saw me and Robert.

I took a box of biccies someone had given me in Scotland round to Mrs Monro as a present, and she was pleased to see me. She was. She was really pleased. I can tell. Oh, it is so warming when someone is really pleased to see you. I could talk to her. Not about Robert any more because every time I thought of Robert being so annoying I thought of vengeance and I couldn’t tell her that, so I didn’t talk about Robert. I sat down and said Monica and I were going to see Cynthia and Derek to make sure they’d put buttons on the kiddies’ frocks.

‘Eugh,’ said Mrs Monro, ‘Derek. I don’t think I’ll be able to look at him. I can’t think how Monica can bear to look at him.’

But I knew that even if they remembered what had happened they wouldn’t really remember, neither Monica nor Derek. I knew how bad people lived with themselves. After a while they pretended somebody else had done it—no matter what it was. Even now I was beginning to pretend that some other person had spent the better part of a night in a moth-eaten old summerhouse. Not me. Not Lili. No.

Mrs Monro wished Derek was dead. I told her that bad people always started to die before they died, that corruption was a sign of death. Dear Lord. But I wasn’t bad, not really stinkingly bad, not so bad the angels would have to hold their noses. Was I? I was so glad Syl’s mother didn’t know the last bad thing I’d done.