‘A dry sherry,’ said the young man behind the vast mahogany counter, speaking like an actor throwing away a line.

‘Yes. At least . . .’ She was not sure that she had heard aright. ‘Not sweet,’ she repeated, in order to be on the safe side. ‘And I want the best.’

‘Tío Pepe? Amontillado?’

‘Whichever is the better. I know nothing about it,’ she added unnecessarily.

Just then a door in the glass-and-mahogany partition behind the counter opened and Mr Walter Freeman, sole survivor of the families of Freeman and Marsh who had given their names to the business more than two hundred years earlier, stepped down into the shop. He was in his sixties, a dandy, in an unobtrusive way, and he had been in his youth, and for some years after it had fled, a bit of a dog with the ladies. He had kept his eye for the type which appealed to him, and in some details Miss Mayfield complied with it. He liked little, fair, helpless women, and Miss Mayfield, who was small and fair, was, at that moment, looking the very epitome of helplessness. Regretfully noting that she was also dowdy, he nevertheless said, ‘All right, Rowton,’ and to Miss Mayfield, ‘Perhaps I could help you.’

She was obliged to expose her ignorance for a second time, and this time was conscious of it, so that a faint pink colour rose in her cheeks.

‘It’s quite a decision,’ Mr Freeman said gravely, ‘and not one to make in a hurry. Would you like to come this way?’

He lifted a section of the counter, opened the door behind it and, with an air, conducted her into a big, comfortable room which in decoration and furnishing had scarcely changed since the original Walter Freeman and his cousin Richard Marsh had sat there.

‘Do sit down,’ he said, pushing a big leather chair an inch forward. Miss Mayfield did so, under the impression that sherry was sold in this special department, where – as in some clothes shops – it was not the done thing to have the goods on view. She was confirmed in this thought when Mr Freeman went to a cupboard. However, no bottles of sherry were revealed, but several decanters and some glasses.

‘The only way to choose a sherry exactly to your taste is to sample it,’ he said. ‘Now, a dry sherry you said, I think.’

‘But it isn’t for me. I never drink it. It’s just that someone comes to see me now and again and I would like to have some sherry to offer him, and all I know is that he doesn’t like it sweet.’

Mr Freeman, who was a busybody and liked knowing things about people just for the sake of knowing, said cunningly:

‘I suppose the gentleman wouldn’t, by any chance, be one of my customers.’

‘I don’t know. It’s Canon Thorby, of Walwyk.’