‘He sensed it happen. He can feel things like that. He watched me for, oh, years. I must have been seven when it first happened. I thought it was a silly game. I called it “sending”. I didn’t really know the power of it. I was very careful not to cause confusion – but it always made me ill. When I was at school, once or twice I played tricks on the mistresses – putting things in locked rooms, things like that. But honestly, my darling, the pain of it was too much to bear.’ She placed the tea-cup down and began fiddling with the sugar tongs. ‘I didn’t do it for years. Then my twenty-first birthday party arrived. My cousin Bunny Vere was staying, with a party down from the Varsity. They were all mostly boating yahoos, who roared and played billiards and smoked and cheeked me.

‘But not John Temple. He was different from the others. He was slender, dark-haired. He’d come up from a grammar school in Kent. The others would rag him about it dreadfully, but he didn’t mind. He just carried on doing what he did best. He had a look, a kind of burning, innocent look. He was reading a poem –“Gerontion” it was called. By a chap called Eliot. Rather a new thing, back then. How well I remember those words.’ She put her shawl over her head, and for a moment, the old, lively Zita was back as she declaimed some lines from the poem.

Then she took the shawl off and placed it back over her bare shoulders. ‘John didn’t say anything to me that morning at breakfast, but he dropped his toast, and marmalade went all over his dear white trousers, and he looked so sweet and confused when he picked it up … Anyway, I’m babbling, forgive me.’ Tears were trembling in the corners of her eyes. ‘There was a feeling in my heart, like wings. All I could think about was John and how I would dance with him. There was something special in him, like a flame. I knew my mother didn’t approve of him – she wanted someone with money or a title, or preferably both, not some son of a Kentish greengrocer.

‘That night, I sent myself to him as he lay in his bed. I don’t really know why. He wasn’t frightened. He stretched out his hand, and I stretched out mine, and then I left him. Of course next morning at breakfast he thought it was just a dream. The way he looked at me, I knew that he loved me. And what was strange was that it hadn’t made me tired – I wasn’t tired at all.