After that, for a while she saw no one, but nearer the centre of the town several people were still awake and moving. She asked a respectable-looking couple who said they had only arrived that afternoon; the man said he thought the station lay in one direction, the woman was sure it was in the opposite. Miss Mayfield thanked them, stood indecisive and then, seeing a soldier, asked him. In Africa any kind of uniform postulated reliability and intelligence above the average, and she was shocked to discover that this young man was very drunk indeed, so drunk that he seemed to find something immensely comic about her. He laughed and said something about being too late. Then she encountered a series of helpful and knowledgeable people who waved their arms and jerked their heads and said left, right, straight on, then left, but not first left, second. And so at last she reached the station only to learn that the next train for London did not leave until five-forty.

She compelled herself to be calm. If, back at Barnhurst, anyone had wakened, made a search and found her gone, the station would be the place where they would have come to look, wouldn’t it? And with a car, knowing the way, they could have been here by now.

Nevertheless, the time of waiting seemed longer than any week through which she had previously lived, and it was not until she was safely in the train that she drew a really deep, satisfying breath.

16

THE KIND AND HELPFUL YOUNG MAN IN THE Information Office at Liverpool Street Station had told her that Selbury was the nearest station to Walwyk, and when, at eleven twenty-five on that sultry August morning, she saw the station’s name on the first hanging sign and felt the train slow down, her heart began to thud again. In a moment she would be among scenes which should be familiar; she was about to test her own theory that the cure might lie in familiar surroundings.

She was a little fearful, too. Her absence would long ago have been discovered; by using a telephone they could have someone here, waiting for her. She gazed fearfully up and down the platform, and then descended the stairs, keeping ridiculously close to a thick-set man, the only other passenger to alight.

In the yard a taxi was waiting and she scuttled to it.

‘Will you drive me to Walwyk?’

‘Cost you thirty bob. Might be more. Can’t tell till I know the mileage.’

‘That will be all right,’ she said, and seated herself on the edge of the seat, looking out eagerly to left, to right, seeking for something which would strike a chord in her memory. But she might never have been here in all her life before.

The man drove with assurance to the edge of the town, and there, where the roads forked, slowed down to study a signpost.