It was a very small wound to have caused such concern. That night by the river there had been so much blood...

‘It’s nothing to cry about,’ said my mother contemptuously, and I said that I wasn’t crying. Lili agreed with me, saying that a reddened nose didn’t count as crying, not in her book.

‘I have a good cry sometimes,’ she said, ‘in the same way that I sometimes have a spring-clean. I close the house and take the phone off the hook and I cry.’

‘Why?’ asked my mother.

‘It’s good for me,’ explained Lili. ‘You should try it yourself. It would do you a world of good.’

‘I can’t think what you’ve got to cry about,’ said my mother, managing to imply that she herself had far more to cry about than Lili and far too much strength of character to do so.

‘All living beings,’ said Lili, ‘have something to cry about.’

I could tell by her voice that she had just said something which she believed, and I was surprised, because I had somehow thought her too clever really to believe anything.

‘Sometimes,’ she said, ‘I sink into a grand black horror of depression, but I don’t cry so much then I stay in bed and pluck at the counterpane and listen to the winds of solitude roaring at the edge of infinity and the wolves of evil baying down the void, and I look into the darkness.’

My mother obviously considered this to be both morbid and affected. ‘For goodness sake, Lili,’ she said, ‘do try and say something cheerful.’

‘I can’t think of anything just at present,’ said Lili. ‘Can you?’

‘The wedding of course,’ said my mother ill-advisedly.

Lili frowned, and I wondered what would happen if I should say that the wedding was cancelled.

‘It’s going to be so jolly,’ said my mother.

Lili and I were silent and I wondered for a moment how I would be feeling if I was going to marry the man I loved—had loved, I amended in my mind, for surely even I couldn’t be so idiotic as to love still where I had met with such treachery. But I could. I was sufficiently idiotic to love with a longing that weakened me as though I was bleeding.

‘We’re having canapés,’ said my mother doggedly, ‘and asparagus rolls and vols-au-vent.’

‘Of course,’ said Lili, ‘and champagne and speeches and confetti.’ Her tone was flat and glum and my mother looked at her suspiciously.

‘What’s wrong with that?’ she asked.

‘Nothing, nothing,’ said Lili, ‘only I do hate weddings. I wish I’d had a gypsy wedding, jumping over the fire and fleeing into the night.’

‘You’d have burned your red frock,’ said my mother acidly.

‘Then Robert would have stamped out the flames and carried me still smouldering into the thicket.’

‘Robert would have turned the fire extinguisher on you,’ said my mother with what I thought was unusual perception.