‘It’s your niece,’ Philip said, recognizing the white mackintosh, but not the happy sleepy face. She frightened him like an unlucky number; he nearly told Baines what Mrs Baines had said; but he didn’t want to bother, he wanted to leave things alone.

‘Why, so it is,’ Baines said, ‘I shouldn’t wonder if she was going to have a bite of supper with us.’ But he said they’d play a game, pretend they didn’t know her, slip down the area steps, ‘and here,’ Baines said, ‘we are,’ lay the table, put out the cold sausages, a bottle of beer, a bottle of ginger pop, a flagon of harvest burgundy. ‘Everyone his own drink,’ Baines said. ‘Run upstairs, Phil, and see if there’s been a post.’

Philip didn’t like the empty house at dusk before the lights went on. He hurried. He wanted to be back with Baines. The hall lay there in quiet and shadow prepared to show him something he didn’t want to see. Some letters rustled down, and someone knocked. ‘Open in the name of the Republic.’ The tumbrils rolled, the head bobbed in the bloody basket. Knock, knock, and the postman’s footsteps going away. Philip gathered the letters. The slit in the door was like the grating in a jeweller’s window. He remembered the policeman he had seen peer through. He had said to his nurse, ‘What’s he doing?’ and when she said, ‘He’s seeing if everything’s all right,’ his brain immediately filled with images of all that might be wrong. He ran to the baize door and the stairs. The girl was already there and Baines was kissing her. She leant breathless against the dresser. ‘This is Emmy, Phil.’

‘There’s a letter for you, Baines.’

‘Emmy,’ Baines said, ‘it’s from her.’ But he wouldn’t open it. ‘You bet she’s coming back.’

‘We’ll have supper, anyway,’ Emmy said. ‘She can’t harm that.’

‘You don’t know her,’ Baines said. ‘Nothing’s safe. Damn it,’ he said, ‘I was a man once,’ and he opened the letter.

‘Can I start?’ Philip asked, but Baines didn’t hear; he presented in his stillness and attention an example of the importance grown-up people attached to the written word: you had to write your thanks, not wait and speak them, as if letters couldn’t lie. But Philip knew better than that, sprawling his thanks across a page to Aunt Alice who had given him a doll he was too old for. Letters could lie all right, but they made the lie permanent: they lay as evidence against you; they made you meaner than the spoken word.

‘She’s not coming back till tomorrow night,’ Baines said. He opened the bottles, he pulled up the chairs, he kissed Emmy again against the dresser.

‘You oughtn’t to,’ Emmy said, ‘with the boy here.’