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sounds ever so nice. Why not write to them and just see? You don’t have to go there if you don’t fancy it.”
    “You can write if you want,” said Eunice.
    Like all her close acquaintances, Annie suspected Eunice was illiterate or semiliterate, but no one could ever be quite sure. Eunice sometimes seemed to read magazines and she could sign things. There are many people, after all, who never read or write, although they can. So Annie wrote the letter to Jacqueline, and when the time came for the interview it was Annie who primed Eunice.
    “Be sure to call her madam, Eun, and don’t speak till you’re spoken to. Mother was in service when she was a girl and she knew all about it. I can give you a good many of Mother’s tips.” Poor Annie. She had been devoted to her mother, and the pension-book fraud had been perpetrated as much as a way of keeping her mother alive and with her as for gain. “You can have a lend of Mother’s court shoes too. They’ll be about your size.”
    It worked. Before Eunice could think much about it, she was engaged as the Coverdales’ housekeeper, and if it was at twenty-five rather than thirty-five pounds a week, either seemed a fortune to her. And yet, why was she so easily persuaded, she who was as bound to her burrow and her warren as any wild animal?
    Not for change, not for pastures new, not for adventure, pecuniary advantage, or even the chance of showing off the one thing she could do well. Largely, she took the job to avoid responsibility.
    While her father was alive, though things had been bad in many respects, they had been good in one. He took responsibility for the rent and the rates and the services bills, for filling in forms and reading what had to be read. Eunice took the rates round to the council offices in cash, paid the gas and electricity bills in the same way. But she couldn’t hire television or buy iton the H.P. There would have been forms to fill in. Letters and circulars came. She couldn’t read them. Lowfield Hall would solve all that and, as far as she could see, receive her and care for her in the only way she was interested in forever.
    The house was rendered up to an amazed and delighted landlord, and Mrs. Samson saw to the selling of the furniture. Eunice watched the valuing of her household goods, the indifference on the man’s face, with an inscrutable expression. She packed everything she possessed into two suitcases, borrowed from Mrs. Samson. In her navy skirt, hand-knitted navy jumper, and raincoat, she made, characteristically, her farewells to that kind neighbour, that near mother who had been present when her own mother gave her birth.
    “Well, I’m off,” said Eunice.
    Mrs. Samson kissed her cheek, but she didn’t ask Eunice to write to her, for she was the only living person who really knew.
    At Liverpool Street Station Eunice regarded trains—trains proper, not tubes—for the first time in nearly forty years. But how to find which one to take? On the departure board, white on black, were meaningless hieroglyphs.
    She hated asking questions, but she had to.
    “Which platform for Stantwich?”
    “It’s up on the board, lady.”
    And again, to someone else: “Which platform for Stantwich?”
    “It’s up on the board. Thirteen. Can’t you read?”
    No, she couldn’t, but she didn’t dare say so. Still, at last she was on the train, and it must be the right one, for by now eleven people had told her so. Out into the country the train took her and back into the past. She was a little girl again, going with her school to Taunton and safety, and her whole future was before her. Now, as then, the stations passed, nameless and unknown.
    But she would know Stantwich when she got there, for the train and her future went no further.

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    She was bound to fail. She had no training and no experience. People like the Coverdales were far removed from any people she had ever known, and she was not accommodating or adaptable. She had never been