‘My twenty years in Africa I most certainly did. About more recent times, I can’t, of course, speak. I like children. The Walwyk children seem to have liked me.’ She told him about the little wireless set, and blushing because it seemed rather an immodest thing to do, repeated the message which the children had sent with it. ‘In fact,’ she said, ‘everybody has been very kind – up to a point. What does rather worry me is that nobody at all has come to see me.’

‘Is that one of the things you cry about?’

‘Not directly. I cry because I can’t remember. You know how it is when you forget a name, or a book title. It’s like having an itch that you can’t scratch. And I have that feeling about a whole section of my life. It’s enough to make anyone cry.’

She was completely rational, and, from his point of view, completely unrewarding.

‘You’ll have noticed,’ he said, ‘that in the cases of a temporary lapse, such as you have mentioned, trying to remember does more harm than good. At some moment when you have ceased to try to remember, what you want flashes back into your mind. I think that if you can just be patient and divert your thoughts from yourself and your condition, you have every chance of recovering your memory.’

He made some vague resolve – never fulfilled – to go to this place Walwyk and see if the clue to the puzzle could be found there. Before his next visit to Wandford, however, Miss Mayfield had gone.

It all happened very suddenly: One evening the hospital Almoner visited Miss Mayfield and said that Canon Thorby had been in touch with her.

‘But I understood that Canon Thorby was abroad.’

‘I didn’t go into the matter of where he was, Miss Mayfield. I merely listened to his suggestion regarding you. A very sensible and kindly one, in my opinion.’

Most of her work was concerned with the problems of the poor; mothers of new babies going home to take up, prematurely, the burden of family life; old people living alone; disabled victims of accidents, uncertain of the immediate future.

‘Canon Thorby,’ she said, ‘has a friend – a widow, Mrs Mott-Tyler, in rather straitened circumstances, I gather – who takes paying guests in her house near Hove. Miss Thorby has stayed there, he says, on one or two occasions and been very comfortable indeed. His suggestion is that you should go there and have a good rest and a holiday.’