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dart she bestowed a powdery kiss.
    â€œShe likes you.” The old lady was instantly asleep, but her octogenarian authority prevailed. “I feel sorry for men,” Frances relaxed in her seat, “there’s so much duty for them.”
    â€œLook,” Walter said, “Billy asked me — if I’d keep you company.”
    â€œReally?” She shifted away from Mrs Stinson,leaning a shoulder on the glass, confronting Walter with unsmiling directness. “I don’t know him all that well. We only met once. Did he really say that? I wish people wouldn’t try to run my life for me.”
    It was then, right at that moment, that his idea of her changed. This was when it started, the murmur of sensation that was to accompany him all night, then for months, years — it began with her manner, then her voice, her withheld opinions, then the opinions themselves opening out, then his hunger for everything about her — open-mouthed.
    â€œI shouldn’t have done what he said. I shouldn’t have joined you, eh?”
    â€œOh, no. I didn’t mean you. How could I? I meant — everyone else.” She was suddenly amused again. “Except Mrs Stinson. She’s so old nothing bothers her. There’s nothing she doesn’t know — about people, that is. Do you like people?”
    He had never considered it.
    â€œI sometimes think people and art are all that matters.”
    â€œArt?”
    â€œI mean the theatre. Bernard Shaw. Shakespeare.” She had never seen any, but Twelfth Night was coming up. “Adeline Genée.” She described the “wheatsheaf” adagio, in which the star pirouetted within the embrace of her partner’s arms, yet so exactly on the one spot that he never really touched her.
    â€œThat’s art all right.”
    â€œMrs Stinson was on the stage,” Frances whispered, suggesting an intensely important past which the old lady confirmed by her physical attitude, nodding monumentally under the rugs which descended in a dark masonry of lumps and folds. “She sings beautifully.” Walter stared respectfully at the sleeping figure. Such achievements alarmed his Presbyterian soul a little, but if Frances saw her as grand so would he.
    Now Frances was preoccupied, searching for a handkerchief, wetting her lips with a curved tongue, blinking. Her half turned face revealed a shining corner of eye, a clear curve of cheekbone, a mouth poised to speak lucidly — Walter thought — for an entire self.
    â€œI’ve got a coal in my eye,” she mumbled.
    She twisted a corner of handkerchief and used the window as a mirror. “Nearly …”, tugging her lower lid to reveal a reddened hollow, running the handkerchief along a blood-coloured edge. Walter, reclining on an elbow, could see Mrs Stinson’s reflection past Frances’s doubled head. The old lady seemed to be sitting far outside the train.
    â€œThere.”
    Frances held out the rolled up handkerchief like a wand, with a black speck visible on the wet tip of cloth.
    â€œBilly told Dad he was a Catholic, but I knew better.” Frances settled back in her seat and smiled a level somehow mocking smile.
    â€œDid you like him?”
    After hurling the question at Frances he peered out the window, cupping a hand over his eyes to disown any but the mildest interest in her reply. “He’s a bit of a —”, he paused, looking from the window to Frances and back again, blowing mist on the glass, attempting to smear Billy out of favour. “I don’t know —”
    â€œI’m not sure I like him. He’s very direct.” She shot a glance at the slumped heap that was Mrs Stinson, and whispered: “He tried to kiss me.”
    â€œOh.”
    â€œHe only tried. Beery men have tried before.”
    Walter felt impossibly clean and young in his newly pressed and odourless school outfit. “We were at school