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the winey, camphorous smell of her breath and her clothes.
    ‘Only Father’s grave. I shall plant Mother’s and Linda’s tomorrow evening.’
    She swayed, steadying herself against the stone, and then, with a swinging movement, as if on deck in wild weather, made off through the churchyard, lurching from one gravestone to another, her hands out to balance her, her basket hanging from her arm. She was soon lost to Hester’s sight, but the sound of her unsteady progress, as she brushed through branches of yew and scuffled the gravel, continued longer. When she could hear no more, the girl walked back to the house. She had forgotten the snakes and the bats and all the terrors of nature; and she found that for a little while she had forgotten Robert, and Muriel, too; and the sorrows and shame of love.
    As she crossed the lawn, Hugh Baseden and Rex Wigmore came round the house from the garages. Stepping out of the darkness into the light shed from upstairs windows, she looked pale-skinned and mysterious, and both men were arrested by a change in her. The breeze blew strands of hair forwards across her face and she turned her head impatiently, so that the hair was whipped back again, lifting up from her ears, around which it hung so untidily by day.
    ‘I thought you were a ghost coming from the churchyard,’ Hugh said. ‘Weren’t you nervous out there by yourself?’
    ‘No.’
    But her teeth began to chatter and she drew her elbows tight to her waist to stop herself shivering.
    ‘What
have
you been up to?’ Rex asked.
    ‘I went for a walk.’
    ‘Alone? How absurd! How wasteful! How unsafe! You never know what might happen to you. If you want to go for a walk, you could always ask me. I like being out with young girls in the dark. I make it even unsafer. And, at least, you could be quite sure what would happen to you then.’
    ‘You are cold,’ Hugh said. He opened the door and, as she stepped past him into the hall, brushed his hand down her bare arm. ‘You
are
cold.’
    Rex’s remarks, which he deplored, had excited him. He imagined himself – not Rex – walking in the dark with her. He had had so few encounters with women, so few confidings, explorings, and longed to take on some hazards and excitements.
    Rex, whose life was full enough of all those things, was bored and wandered off. He found her less attractive – hardly attractive at all – indoors and in the bright light of the hall.

    Hester rarely spoke at meal-times, but next morning at breakfast she mentioned the old lady.
    ‘Miss Despenser.’ Muriel put her hand to her face as she had when speaking of the dead rabbit in the laboratory. She breathed as if she felt faint. ‘She came to tea once. Once only. I wondered if I should pour whisky in her tea. She is the village drunk. I believe her sister was the village idiot. But now dead.’
    ‘You shouldn’t go out late at night on your own,’ Robert said. ‘You might catch cold,’ he added, for he could really think of no reason why she should not go – only the vague unease we feel when people venture out late, alone – a guilty sense of having driven them out, or of having proved inadequate to keep them, or still their restlessness, or win their confidence.
    ‘It is a wonder she could spare time from the Hand and Flowers,’ Muriel said. ‘I am surprised to hear of her tidying the graves in licensed hours.’
    ‘And shall you water the plants?’ Robert asked in amusement.
    ‘I have done. She said, before the sun got too strong.’
    ‘What impertinence!’ Muriel said, and every lash at Miss Despenser was really one at Hester. She felt even more agitated and confused this morning, for Rex’s words with their innuendo and suggestion had been spoken beneath her bedroom window the previous night and she, lying in bed, half-reading, had heard him.
    Until that moment, she had seen the threat in Hester’s youth, defencelessness and pathos; but she had not thought of her as being desirable in