Both Mrs Mott-Tyler and Miss Ellison made an obvious effort to be kind to Miss Mayfield. It was obvious because neither of them was sympathetic by nature or imaginative enough to understand her problem. Much of Mrs Mott-Tyler’s youth had been spent in India; she had shot the three tigers whose skins lay in the hall; she spoke nostalgically of hunting in Leicestershire, of ski-ing in Davos. She had carried into her fifties a good deal of a hard blonde beauty, an excellent constitution and much of the slangy dash of the twenties. Within ten minutes of making her acquaintance Miss Mayfield knew that she would have nothing but scorn for self-pity, and that had she been afflicted with loss of memory, she would have made a joke of it – ‘So what the hell. I hope I’ve forgotten my debts.’ But she had a certain charm, and she exerted herself to make Miss Mayfield feel welcome. On some rare occasions when there was no one else to do it, she would wait upon her herself, in a casual, slapdash way which always made Miss Mayfield feel both flattered and apologetic.

‘I was supposed to be coming to help you,’ she protested once.

‘I don’t know what Hal was thinking about when he said that. Doing the flowers, I suppose. I happen to like doing my own flowers.’

‘And you do them much better than I ever could. But I could do errands – when I’ve found my way round the shops.’

‘It’s too far to walk, anyway. No, you just rest up and get a bit of flesh on your bones. What a pity it is you don’t play bridge.’

The question of bridge had arisen almost at once. Mrs Mott-Tyler, Miss Ellison and General Fordham were all keen and expert players. They had hoped to find in Miss Mayfield a fourth. Asked if she played, Miss Mayfield said:

‘I don’t know. So far as I remember, I never did. But in the part of my life which I have forgotten, I may have learned all kinds of things.’

‘People don’t learn much after they’re forty,’ said Miss Ellison, and her manner of speaking made the words sound brutal.

So after Miss Mayfield’s arrival, as before, they were dependent upon one or another of their neighbours. Each evening someone came in for bridge, and each evening Miss Mayfield read. There were a few books in the house – hardly any to her taste – and one day she asked Mrs Mott-Tyler if there was a public library in the town.

‘I wouldn’t know. There’s a subscription library. And somebody gave me a subscription to it for my birthday, God knows why. I’ll see if I can rout it out, and tomorrow we’ll go down and get you the latest version of Gone with the Wind .’