‘Who?’ asked Lili casually, lighting a cigarette and shading the lighter flame with her hand.

‘I could have sworn that was Syl,’ said my mother. ‘He looked straight at me and went straight out again.’

‘He works somewhere round here,’ said Lili. ‘Perhaps it was him.’

‘At this time?’ said my mother. ‘And why did he go like that?’

‘Perhaps he had a secret assignation,’ said Lili. She looked up, into my eyes, and grinned.

My mother recovered herself. ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she said, ‘I must have been mistaken. The light’s none too good in here.’

The moules marinières, by the way, were unexceptional.

‘And this is my present to the bride,’ said Syl. He had been very noticeably kind over the past few days: thoughtful, and seeming more mature and sensible, as though the imminence of marriage had indeed begun to bring about that change of which my elders spoke—the settling down, as it was called. There had been no unexplained nights away and no displays of petulance, and when he set off through the gates of his house he drove slowly and with care. Nobody had spoken of this new responsible attitude, because to do so would be to admit that his behaviour had previously left something to be desired, and my mother had spent too much time in implicit denial of this to waste it all now. I wasn’t deceived, for Nour had been kind when I had been what he called ‘good’, and I had thought that a new Nour had been born who was made for me, designed for all my needs and desires, and we would be unchangingly happy together until the end of time. I had thought that for about five days.

‘Oh Syl,’ my mother said effusively as he laid the oblong package on the drawing-room table. ‘What is it?’

Clearly it was I who should have spoken these words, but already I had a feeling that I knew what the brown paper and the ribbed cardboard concealed, and I wasn’t going to say a word until time or circumstance compelled me.

‘Open it, Margaret,’ cried my mother, and as I made no move she herself ripped off its coverings.

‘Oh, how lovely,’ she said less effusively, for after all it was only one of Robert’s paintings.

I knew as I was doing it that I shouldn’t be following them, through the snake-laced paths to the river in the moonlight, to the broken house with the pigeon tower: that shame would be the result—my shame, for I cared nothing what their feelings might be. I was used to shame. I had felt it for my mother before my father left when she would intercept his post, putting certain violet-scented envelopes into the pocket of her dress and steaming them open in the kitchen after he had left for work. The indignity of peering into other people’s intimacies had appalled me, quite overpowering the acquired, accepted knowledge that reading other people’s letters was one of the things that wasn’t done. I had felt all my life that lavatory and bedroom doors should be kept firmly shut, for fear of what they might reveal. My mother had taught me that, just as she had taught me to change my underclothes daily and not blow my nose in public. Walking silently and in stealth over the harsh grass I remembered all the things an English gentlewoman shouldn’t do, and the thing my mother had done.