I said, ‘Marie Claire won’t come to the wedding. She’s frightened of me.’ On the face of it this was a pointless remark. Something drove me to say: ‘She doesn’t know I know she’s been having an affair with Robert.’ I had to tell somebody. It was rankling in me. ‘Good heavens,’ said Syl’s mother, not sounding too perturbed.

‘But she’s not sure I won’t find out,’ I said. I found it difficult to leave the subject alone, but for the moment Syl’s mother was more interested in Margaret than in me. I began to try and think of something else. I looked round and tried to picture Margaret living here. It wasn’t possible. It was too sad, too depressing. The house needed somebody with a bit of sparkle. Syl’s mother needed somebody with a bit of sparkle. Margaret would just fade like the curtains, go limp like the cushions and all the lights would get dimmer and dimmer. Poor Margaret.

‘A nun,’ said Mrs Monro reflectively, ‘a nun. Yes, I see.’

‘I believe it,’ I said. ‘There was some fuss in Egypt—some rubbish Marie Claire was going on about—but I think the nun part is all true.’

‘I think so too,’ said Mrs Monro. ‘I really don’t think there ought to be a wedding.’

‘I don’t think there will be,’ I said, and I meant that I would stop it.

I don’t know when I made up my mind that I must keep my word. It might have been just then when Mrs Monro looked as though she trusted me, as though she thought I might be capable of anything. Well, I was capable of anything. In the end I proved it. Or it might have been when the cleaning lady told me Robert was not to be trusted alone with Margaret. Or it might have been when Margaret had looked at me with big trusting eyes and almost asked me aloud to help her—to please, please help her. I don’t know. I have a destructive impulse in me—often I have thought of suicide and sometimes of murder—but I don’t know what I then had decided to destroy. Monica’s hopes? Or Syl’s? Or Robert’s? Or just me. Or perhaps I simply couldn’t resist the compulsion to go centre stage; what Robert called ‘showing off’. Oh, I was angry with Robert. Not only because of Marie Claire, but because often he had made me feel insecure. He had assumed superiority over me and I’d let him get away with it. The time of reckoning—I said to myself—had come. Fasten your seat-belts.