Isabel was his loved one. The almost pathological attachment ran back to the days of his earliest childhood, when Isabel, indomitable as a tigress, had stood between him and the torments which Freddie delighted to devise for anyone smaller and weaker than himself. Only two years his senior, Isabel had been his champion, his mother. His real mother had expended all her maternalism on Freddie and Isabel, and his father was already deeply engrossed in a genealogical study of every family in Walwyk, as recorded in the Parish Registers, counting it a very happy day when he could say, ‘Do you realize that when Ralph Fletcher married Matilda Hayward, he was marrying his grandmother’s aunt? Fantastic as that may sound, when you consider the dates . . .’

Only Isabel had cared about Harold, and in return Harold cared only for Isabel, so beautiful, so clever and so kind.

In the year nineteen twenty-two, when Harold was serving his curateship in a Stepney parish, Isabel had gone to North Africa on a ‘dig’ somewhere near Carthage. And she had come home in a state for which no twentieth-century physician had a term, though the realistic Victorians called it a decline. Not speaking, refusing to eat, she had lain in her bed, waiting for, longing for, death. Even he, who had always been so close to her and who had come home for the purpose from his Stepney parish, had failed to make any contact with her. On his second day home she had taken an overdose of sleeping tablets, and died.

They’d wasted a whole day, thinking her asleep; and when in the evening the doctor came, he was reproachful. ‘If only you’d sent for me sooner . . .’ The parents were distressed, his mother particularly; but for him the whole light had gone out of the world. Then, while in the study the doctor and his father were circulating cautiously around the question of the exact wording of the death certificate, his mother had said:

‘They say Phoebe Rigby . . . Drive me to Curlew Lane.’

‘But . . .’ he said.

‘Don’t argue. We’ve wasted too much time already.’

They’d gone out to his car, a little bull-nosed Morris two-seater. In Curlew Lane, outside an ordinary-looking cottage, his mother had said:

‘Stop. Turn round anywhere as best you can.’

By the time he had negotiated a turn in the narrow, sloping lane, his mother and a neat, prim-looking little woman were waiting.

‘Drive Mrs Rigby to the house and take her to Isabel’s room. I’ll walk.’

He’d had some vague idea that Mrs Rigby was the layer-out for the village, and the feeling of haste about the business added some faint last touch of horror. He’d led her to the door of the room where Isabel lay and said, ‘Please ring if you want anything.’ She’d given him a peculiar look and gone in and shut the door.