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buying nothing except a cake which she thought might be useful for the house. She found the atmosphere of the town relaxing as if people had all the time in the world, as if they were able to converse with each other without pressure or strain. A man who was cleaning the roads and piling withered leaves into a barrow said good morning to her. The quality of the light attracted her, it seemed softer and more restful than that of Edinburgh, and it appeared to make the houses soft yet clear. The air too was blander than the cold piercing air of Edinburgh.
    After she had walked about the town for a while she decided that she would do what Tom had suggested and sit on a bench in the railed garden in the square. She opened the gate and walked in and sat down. Beside her on the bench was a woman with a shopping bag: she was slightly bow-legged and had varicose veins. She hadn’t been sitting long when the woman spoke to her. It seemed to her that she had seen the woman before, perhaps in church: or it might be that she was confusing her with someone she had seen in Edinburgh, for she found, strangely enough that as she walked along the street she met people who reminded her of ones whom she had known or met in Edinburgh.
    “It’s a nice day,” said the woman. “And it’s a relief to have a seat.”
    “Yes,” said Mrs Mallow, “isn’t it?”
    The woman had small birdlike eyes and what might have been a slightly Irish accent. She was in fact the sort of woman that Mrs Mallow might well have met in the early days of her marriage when she was living in a tenement in Edinburgh and for this reason she was immediately attracted to her as if she recalled to her days when she had been thoughtlessly happy, and the world had been open and free, and also full of bustle and noise. She relaxed, almost visibly.
    “Do you come from here?” she asked.
    “I’ve been living here for forty years or so. You could say I belonged here. I stay on my own, though: that’s why I come down here so often. My husband’s dead and my sons are all away. What about yourself?”
    The woman had a brisk, direct manner of speaking which Mrs Mallow liked, and she was unusually talkative as she told her why she herself now lived in the town.
    “My sons have asked me to go and live with them too,” said the woman as if she and Mrs Mallow had suddenly become involved in a competition, “but I won’t go except for holidays. One of my sons is a manager of a shop in England, and I’ve got another son in the Army. I used to stay with the one in England for a while. As a matter of fact, I was down there last summer, but I don’t like the wife. She and I don’t get on.” She shut her lips like a purse and stared fiercely ahead of her. It seemed that she would have been quite willing to wring the necks of the tall, foreign-looking flowers.
    “Of course,” she said, “it may be something wrong with me too. I’ve got my own ways and she’s got hers and that’s the way it is. She wouldn’t make me porridge in the mornings and I like my porridge. She told me I could make it myself if I wanted to. She goes out to work and I don’t believe in that. She should stay at home and look after the children—they’ve got three lovely children. Give me the old-fashioned woman any time, but these ones nowadays are all skin and bones and all they want to do is go out to the pubs and drink gin or vodka. I never went out when my children were growing up.”
    “Well I’m quite happy,” Mrs Mallow insisted loyally. “I have my own room and I come and go when I please.”
    “They say that the day looks fine first thing in the morning,” said the woman mysteriously, and then, “What does your son do?” She said. “My name’s Mrs Murphy by the way. Pleased to meet you.”
    “My son is a teacher in the school,” said Mrs Mallow rather proudly, “and so is my daughter-in-law. You might know them.”
    “Oh, I don’t know their names now. In the old days when