The Almoner rose with a look of relief. ‘I’ll go and telephone, then. Hove, just now, must be very nice.’

She thought of her own ‘holiday’, spent in Birmingham, looking after her ageing father and mother while the sister who lived with them had the break which enabled her to carry on from year to year.

‘Yes. I’m very fortunate,’ Miss Mayfield said; and managed not to start crying until she was alone.

14

MRS MOTT-TYLER’S LARGE, BEAUTIFUL HOUSE WAS called Barnhurst and stood in what, until comparatively, recent times, had been a lonely country lane; now it was joined to the town’s suburbs by a road full of new houses and bungalows, and there were some in occupation, some being built, on its countryward side. A large garden and several ornamental trees ensured its privacy, however.

The straitened circumstances to which the Almoner had alluded, and of which Mrs Mott-Tyler frequently complained, were, Miss Mayfield thought, merely a matter of comparison. Mrs Mott-Tyler lived very comfortably indeed. She had, at the time of Miss Mayfield’s entry to the household, three guests: two old ladies, who never left their bed sitting-rooms, and a retired General, very arthritic but determinedly mobile. The old ladies were waited upon and cared for by a woman in young middle age who had once been a nurse and with whom Mrs Mott-Tyler was upon what Miss Mayfield described to herself as scornfully intimate terms; the General had his own man, a shrivelled, shuffling little fellow called Washbrook, who saw to all his master’s needs with a surly efficiency and spent the rest of his time evading any attempt to press him into other service. A feud of almost comic proportions was waged between him and Miss Ellison, the nurse, for whom he had once refused to bring back a packet of cigarettes.

‘Let him wait,’ she said darkly. ‘One day he’ll come to me with a cut or a scratch or a snivel, and he’ll get short shrift.’