While they lifted the trunk between them. Miss Mayfield snatched the suitcase and hurried towards the house. She wanted to be alone at this wonderful moment when, for the first time in her whole life, she entered a place which was really her own. Her father’s house, where she had spent the first eighteen years of her life, had been a sentimental shrine to the mother who had died when she was ten. Even so small a variation as the substitution of one flower vase for another would evoke a comment, all the more forceful for being made in a sad and gentle manner: ‘Your dear mother always used the green bowl for daffodils.’ At college, one’s room was, in theory, one’s own, and girls with money to spare had added to or altered the basic furnishings; Deborah Mayfield, with no money to spare and assigned a room of such odd shape and proportions, had been obliged to accept hers as it was and be content. In Entuba, as in a medieval monastery, nobody owned anything; on more than one occasion Miss Mayfield’s very bed had been commandeered; always, she admitted, after Rose’s own. ‘Darling, I knew you wouldn’t mind. It’s the dressings, you see, so difficult for Joyce to do when the patient is on the floor.’ And then there had been Alchester. There, in that overcrowded ant heap, Miss Mayfield had been, she realized, extremely lucky. Janet Lovelace, the Domestic Science mistress, had invited her to share her ‘flatlet’. This was a large attic at the top of a vast decaying house; it had a gas-ring in a corner; the bathroom was thirty steep stairs and two passages away. Janet’s manner of life was a violent and perhaps understandable rebound from all that she taught; she was slovenly and untidy, extravagant as far as her means allowed, and she lived entirely upon pre-prepared or tinned food. Miss Mayfield had made a few determined attempts to cook upon the gas-ring, but had, in the end, been persuaded that Janet was right. When you boiled anything, the steam made the wallpaper blister and bulge; when you fried, the odour got into your books, on to your pillow. To tidy up after Janet was a mere waste of time. Miss Mayfield had contented herself by buying a wastepaper basket made of metal, into which incompletely extinguished cigarette ends could, with safety, be dumped, and by getting her own supply of Vim, with which she scoured the communal bath. Janet, not easily provoked, had once thrown at her the epithet ‘old-maidish’. Miss Mayfield had replied equably, ‘That may be so; an instinct run to seed. I suppose I should be cleaning up the bathroom after three or four boys who had been playing football. Then you’d call it motherly.’