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Since then it’s never looked back.’
    They had passed through the suburbs of Dunlowman and were driving along a road that ran out towards the coast.
    ‘It was nice getting your occasional letters,’ Patrick said, presently. ‘Operative word “occasional”.’
    ‘And yours.’
    ‘I’m glad you haven’t succumbed to the urge for black satin and menacing jewellery that seems to overtake so many girls who get jobs in France. But there’s a change, all the same.’
    ‘You’re not going to suggest I’ve got a phoney foreign accent?’
    ‘No, indeed. You’ve got no accent at all.’
    ‘And that, no doubt, makes the change. I expect having to speak French has cured it.’
    ‘You must converse with Miss Pride. She is, or was, before she succeeded to the Winterbottom riches, a terrifically high-powered coach for chaps entering the Foreign Service. She’s got a network of little spokes all round her mouth from making those exacting noises that are required by the language.’
    ‘You’ve seen her, then?’
    ‘Once. She visited with her sister about a year ago and left in a rage.’
    ‘I suppose,’ Jenny said after a pause, ‘this is really very serious, this crisis?’
    ‘It’s hell,’ he rejoined with surprising violence.
    Jenny asked about Wally Trehern and was told that he had become a menace. ‘He doesn’t know where he is but he knows he’s the star-turn,’ Patrick said. ‘People make little pilgrimages to thecottage which has been tarted up in a sort of Peggotty-style Kitsch. Seaweed round the door almost, and a boat in a bottle. Mrs Trehern keeps herself to herself and the gin bottle but Trehern is a new man. He exudes a kind of honest-tar sanctity and sells Wally to the pilgrims.’
    ‘You appal me.’
    ‘I thought you’d better know the worst. What’s more, there’s an Anniversary Festival next Saturday, organized by Miss Cost. A choral procession to the Spring and Wally, dressed up like a wee fisher lad, reciting doggerel if he can remember it, poor little devil.’
    ‘Don’t!’ Jenny exclaimed. ‘Not true!’
    ‘True, I’m afraid.’
    ‘But Patrick – about the cures? The people that come? What happens?’
    Patrick waited for a moment. He then said in a voice that held no overtones of irony: ‘I suppose, you know, it’s what always happens in these cases. Failure after failure until one thinks the whole thing is an infamous racket and is bitterly ashamed of having any part of it. And then, for no apparent reason, one, perhaps two, perhaps a few more, people do exactly what the others have done but go away without their warts or their migraine or their asthma or their chronic diarrhoea. Their gratitude and sheer exuberance! You can’t think what it’s like, Jenny. So then, of course, one diddles oneself – or is it diddling? – into imagining these cases wipe out all the others and all the ballyhoo, and my fees and this car, and Miss Cost’s Giffte Shoppe. She really has called it that, you know. She sold her former establishment and set up another on the Island. She sells tiny plastic models of the Green Lady and pamphlets she’s written herself, as well as handwoven jerkins and other novelties that I haven’t the face to enumerate. Are you sorry you came?’
    ‘I don’t think so. And your mother? What does she think?’
    ‘Who knows?’ Patrick said, simply. ‘She has a gift for detachment, my mama.’
    ‘And Dr Maine?’
    ‘Why he?’ Patrick said sharply, and then: ‘Sorry: Why not? Bob Maine’s nursing home is now quite large and invariably full.’
    Feeling she had blundered, Jenny said: ‘And the Rector? How on earth has he reacted?’
    ‘With doctrinal léger de main. No official recognition on the one hand. Proper acknowledgments in the right quarter on the other. Jolly sensible of him, in my view.’
    Presently they swept up the downs that lie behind the coastline, turned into a steep lane and were, suddenly, on the cliffs above Portcarrow.
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