In a whisk, in a glancing blow of recognition, she had seen it again, the place where she had lived for three years—in turmoil, in rapture, in drudgery, in fury, in the bitter patience of disillusionment; there, at the close of those three years, she had her last quarrel with Ludovick and walked for the last time down the steep path. Closing the gate, she had heard a sudden gay clatter of crockery. Ludovick, left to himself, was washing up. He’ll soon tire of that, she had thought. He stayed on for another six months; 14then he took himself abroad, and it was from Corsica that he sent her the evidence for their divorce.

The taxi drew up before The Good Hope. Standing on the pavement, she knew a moment of wincing panic. Because she recognized the narrow street, and the porch of The Good Hope, straddling out across the pavement on its short, clumsy pillars, and even the momentary amplification it gave to the voices of the two women who passed under it, deep in village conversation, she felt herself closed in on by recognitions. ‘Proper foolish, I call it,’ one of the women said. The words seemed to be spoken of her.

Saying to herself, ‘But I am old, I am well dressed, my eyebrows are plucked, I am called Mrs Vincent, I have nothing to fear,’ she entered The Good Hope and was conducted to the bedroom she had booked.

The interior of The Good Hope was considerably changed. It was so spruced, so glistening with white paint, chromium ashtrays, brass warming-pans and pink eiderdowns, that, looking down from her bedroom window into the street, she had the impression that she was in a box at the theatre, looking down a stage set. The stage set included a cinema and several newly antiqued teashops, and the stage crowd contained a new social element—people like herself, only younger, walking with a town gait and precision among the fishermen and the slow-footed women. Looking farther along the street, she noticed a hanging sign that wagged in the perpetual wind and bore the words ‘Artist’s Colours and Materials. Crafts.’ Ludovick, the artlessly gratified, the childishly sanguine and childishly downcast, wagging like a 15spaniel at any pat of recognition—what would he make of this commemoration of his Cornish period, this tribute of pink eiderdowns and warming-pans? ‘Hee-haw! Hee-haw!’ she said, mimicking the foghorn. It was still blaring away, but now, competing with the wireless downstairs and the traffic outside, it was no longer portentous and obsessive, as it had been on the cliff road. It sounded foolishly persevering, like an obstinate donkey tethered on a common. The mood of her journey evaporated. Hungry from the sea air, ready to be dispassionately entertained, she went down to the lounge and ordered tea.

Above her table there was a reproduction of the second Sea Anemones, signed and dated with his painstakingly neat ‘L. Dodge. July, 1921.’ How cross everyone had been about it when it was exhibited, and his friendly critics crossest of all, because it had none of the qualities for which they had previously commended him. ‘A regrettable, if wholly successful, attempt to reproduce the wallpaper in the bedroom of some indulged Edwardian kitchenmaid,’ Boddick had written, and someone else had referred to it as ‘this jellied Venus rising from pink froth’. Now the reproduction, in a most respectful frame, hung on the wall where formerly old Mr Tregurtha’s head had left its greasy halo, and no one gave it a glance. With every sup of China tea, with every bite of the solicitously Cornish food—saffron buns and vinegar loaf cake—it became easier to sterilize the past by the present. The weather had changed, too. The fog had lifted; the sun was shining. After tea, she would go for a walk.16