But she wasn’t angry when she came in; she was ingratiating as she opened the night-nursery door – ‘Did you have a good walk, Master Philip?’ – pulled down the blinds, laid out his pyjamas, came back to clear his supper. ‘I’m glad Baines found you. Your mother wouldn’t like you being out alone.’ She examined the tray. ‘Not much appetite, have you, Master Philip? Why don’t you try a little of this nice pudding? I’ll bring you up some more jam for it.’

‘No, no, thank you, Mrs Baines,’ Philip said.

‘You ought to eat more,’ Mrs Baines said. She sniffed round the room like a dog. ‘You didn’t take any pots out of the waste-paper basket in the kitchen, did you, Master Philip?’

‘No,’ Philip said.

‘Of course you wouldn’t. I just wanted to make sure.’ She patted his shoulder and her fingers flashed to his lapel; she picked off a tiny crumb of pink sugar. ‘Oh, Master Philip,’ she said, ‘that’s why you haven’t any appetite. You’ve been buying sweet cakes. That’s not what your pocket money’s for.’

‘But I didn’t,’ Philip said. ‘I didn’t.’

She tasted the sugar with the tip of her tongue.

‘Don’t tell lies to me, Master Philip. I won’t stand for it any more than your father would.’

‘I didn’t, I didn’t,’ Philip said. ‘They gave it me. I mean Baines,’ but she had pounced on the word ‘they’. She had got what she wanted; there was no doubt about that, even when you didn’t know what it was she wanted. Philip was angry and miserable and disappointed because he hadn’t kept Baines’s secret. Baines oughtn’t to have trusted him; grown-up people should keep their own secrets, and yet here was Mrs Baines immediately entrusting him with another.

‘Let me tickle your palm and see if you can keep a secret.’ But he put his hand behind him; he wouldn’t be touched. ‘It’s a secret between us, Master Philip, that I know all about them. I suppose she was having tea with him,’ she speculated.

‘Why shouldn’t she?’ he said, the responsibility for Baines weighing on his spirit, the idea that he had got to keep her secret when he hadn’t kept Baines’s making him miserable with the unfairness of life. ‘She was nice.’

‘She was nice, was she?’ Mrs Baines said in a bitter voice he wasn’t used to.

‘And she’s his niece.’

‘So that’s what he said,’ Mrs Baines struck softly back at him like the clock under the duster. She tried to be jocular. ‘The old scoundrel. Don’t tell him I know, Master Philip.’ She stood very still between the table and the door, thinking very hard, planning something. ‘Promise you won’t tell. I’ll give you that Meccano set, Master Philip …’