Baines had won; he was cocky and the girl was happy. She wiped her face, she opened a pot of powder, and their fingers touched across the table. It occurred to Philip that it would be amusing to imitate Mrs Baines’s voice and call ‘Baines’ to him from the door.

It shrivelled them; you couldn’t describe it in any other way; it made them smaller, they weren’t happy any more and they weren’t bold. Baines was the first to recover and trace the voice, but that didn’t make things as they were. The sawdust was spilled out of the afternoon; nothing you did could mend it, and Philip was scared. ‘I didn’t mean …’ He wanted to say that he loved Baines, that he had only wanted to laugh at Mrs Baines. But he had discovered that you couldn’t laugh at Mrs Baines. She wasn’t Sir Hubert Reed, who used steel nibs and carried a pen-wiper in his pocket; she wasn’t Mrs Wince-Dudley; she was darkness when the night-light went out in a draught; she was the frozen blocks of earth he had seen one winter in a graveyard when someone said, ‘They need an electric drill’; she was the flowers gone bad and smelling in the little closet room at Penstanley. There was nothing to laugh about. You had to endure her when she was there and forget about her quickly when she was away, suppress the thought of her, ram it down deep.

Baines said, ‘It’s only Phil,’ beckoned him in and gave him the pink iced cake the girl hadn’t eaten, but the afternoon was broken, the cake was like dry bread in the throat. The girl left them at once; she even forgot to take the powder; like a small blunt icicle in her white mackintosh she stood in the doorway with her back to them, then melted into the afternoon.

‘Who is she?’ Philip asked. ‘Is she your niece?’

‘Oh, yes,’ Baines said, ‘that’s who she is; she’s my niece,’ and poured the last drops of water on to the coarse black leaves in the teapot.

‘May as well have another cup,’ Baines said.

‘The cup that cheers,’ he said hopelessly, watching the bitter black fluid drain out of the spout.

‘Have a glass of ginger pop, Phil?’

‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Baines.’

‘It’s not your fault, Phil. Why, I could believe it wasn’t you at all, but her. She creeps in everywhere.’ He fished two leaves out of his cup and laid them on the back of his hand, a thin soft flake, and a hard stalk. He beat them with his hand: ‘Today,’ and the stalk detached itself, ‘tomorrow, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday,’ but the flake wouldn’t come, stayed where it was, drying under his blows, with a resistance you wouldn’t believe it to possess. ‘The tough one wins,’ Baines said.