Terry Shaw takes it. “Goodness me. I see what you mean.” She holds it up in the gloom, as if about to pin it to a clothesline. “Might be Hermès,” she says after a second or two. Unlike Lady Brock, she pronounces the name correctly, in the French manner. “I studied art and design when I was young, before I got into this game. Textiles.” She eyes me, her lids heavy; a speculative, suggestive gleam appears. I’ve seen this gleam before in the eyes of female parishioners and as always I meet it with an expression of benign impassivity. The gleam fades, oh well. She returns her attention to the scarf. “Let’s ask Edith.”

—

Coffee time is in full swing in the dayroom, the chatter loud. Here is Mrs. Phelps, breathless, her cheeks flushed to match her pink cardigan. “Dear me, Terry,” she puffs as she sits down. “I shall never get used to this central heating.” She tries to unbutton the cardigan, but can’t manage it. Her fingers are blue at the tips and as bent and thin as twigs. Terry Shaw sits down beside her. “What a lovely Fair Isle pattern, Edith. Let me help you.”

“Go on, then, Terry, my dear.” Mrs. Phelps turns to me. “It’s being helpless I can’t bear. There’s so many things beyond me now. Do you know, I drink my tea through a straw? Who wants to drink tea through a straw?”

“It can’t be much fun,” I say.

“This is the new vicar,” Terry says, as she attends to Mrs. Phelps’s buttons. “Mr. Acton. He’s brought something of yours from the jumble sale, something that you might have wanted to keep?”

Mrs. Phelps, extricating herself from her cardigan, peers at the scarf. “Not mine, dear,” she says. “I’m sorry I can’t help you. Somebody lost it?”

“We’re not sure,” Terry says. “Let’s hope it was put in the jumble on purpose.” Hurriedly she rises to her feet. “I must get on. I’ve got so many phone calls to make.” She hands me the scarf. I stand up too and we shake hands and say goodbye, and she makes her way carefully across the lounge, picking her way past the canes, crutches, walking frames, and wheelchairs, the paraphernalia of old age. A whole generation is here, washed up on a high tide, too light and inconsequential to be carried back with the rest of us into the tumbling sea. It’s not right. But I can’t find an answer.

I’m about to return the scarf to its paper bag when, a few yards away, a woman in a wheelchair announces, “Yes. Yes. Yes.”

A stroke has dragged half of her face downward and one arm lies useless on her lap. The other arm, however, is raised. She’s pointing at my hands.

“Does this belong to you, madam?”