‘You and your little nerves,’ he said and he put his fingers in the back of the collar of my dress and pulled it slightly as though I was a recalcitrant dog.

I didn’t like to be touched by almost anyone. I said, ‘Let me go, Syl’, because I felt ridiculous, crushed between this man and the garden hedge. I spoke calmly since now revulsion had given way to hopelessness. I had remembered the last time I had stood in a garden with a man.

‘I don’t love you, Syl,’ I said. He stood back and let me turn. I looked at his face, which was something I did seldom, for I didn’t like it, and saw that he didn’t believe me; that he found it inconceivable that I shouldn’t love him; that, ageing and unmarried though he was, he believed himself to be irresistible.

I stepped round him and went back to the house.

Lili was alone in the sitting-room. I wanted to tell her that I had told Syl I wouldn’t marry him, but I didn’t, for I felt that once I had told Lili she would somehow prevent me from recanting and that, freed from Syl, I should be bound even tighter to my mother.

There was a hangnail at the side of my thumb and now I took it between my teeth and tore it off so that the blood ran, leaving a scarlet spotting on my dress where it bloused out above my waist.

‘That’s attractive,’ remarked Lili, regarding it distastefully. ‘Spilt blood is quite the untidiest thing I can think of—much worse than milk.’

I sucked my thumb and mumbled that I hadn’t meant to do it.

‘You’ve probably ruined that dress,’ said Lili, and I said it didn’t matter.

‘Come to the kitchen quickly,’ she said, getting to her feet.

She took one of my mother’s gingham breakfast napkins from a drawer and wrung it out in cold water.

‘You keep your thumb in your mouth,’ she advised, ‘and I’ll try and get these stains out.’

‘What have you done?’ asked my mother from the doorway, her arms full of branches of copper beech.

‘It’s all right,’ said Lili. ‘Not a road accident. She just bit her nail.’

‘Well, don’t soak her,’ said my mother. ‘She’ll get pneumonia. How did she bite her nail?’

Lili regarded her, her head tilted thoughtfully.

‘Like this,’ she said after a moment, gripping her own thumbnail between her back teeth and worrying at it.

‘It was a hangnail,’ I explained. ‘I pulled it off and it bled.’

‘You’ll get blood poisoning if you’re not careful,’ said my mother, putting her leaves on the draining-board.

I wondered, since my mother was principally concerned for my health, and Lili only for my dress, why it was that I had felt secure until my mother arrived.

‘There,’ said Lili after a final rub. ‘There may be a mark, but it won’t show too badly. You’d better find a plaster for that thumb or it might start bleeding again.’