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this year, which I haven’t. And what I make from writing barely pays my part of the housekeeping. It was tactful of you not to say so.”
    She hadn’t been going to say it. Stella wasn’t a conveyor-belt writer. You couldn’t expect her novels to make money. What was it that last reviewer had said? “Fastidious observation wedded to elegantly sensitive and oblique prose.” Not surprisingly, Angela could quote all the reviews even if she sometimes wondered what exactly they were trying to say. Wasn’t it she who pasted them with meticulous care into the cuttings book which Stella so affected to despise? She watched while her friend began what they both called her tiger prowl, that compulsive pacing up and down, head lowered, hands sunk in her dressing-gown pockets. Then Stella said: “It’s a pity that cousin of yours is so disagreeable. Otherwise one might not have minded asking him for a loan. He wouldn’t miss it.”
    “But I’ve already asked him. Not about the cottage, of course. But I’ve asked him to lend me some money.”
    It was ridiculous that this should be so difficult to say. After all, Edwin was her cousin. She had a right to ask him. And it was her grandmother’s money after all. There was really no reason why Star should be cross. There were times when she didn’t mind Star’s anger, times even when she deliberately provoked it, waiting with half-shameful excitement for the extraordinary outburst of bitterness and despair of which she herself was less a victim than a privileged spectator, relishing even more the inevitable remorse and self-incrimination, the sweetness of reconciliation. But now for the first time she recognized the chill of fear.
    “When?” There was nothing for it now but to go on.
    “Last Tuesday evening. It was after you decided that we’d have to cancel our bookings for Venice next March because of the exchange rate. I wanted it to be a birthday present, Venice I mean.”
    She had pictured the scene. Herself handing over the tickets and the hotel reservations tucked into one of those extra-large birthday cards. Star trying to hide her surprise and pleasure. Both of them poring over maps and guide books, planning the itinerary of every marvellous day. To see for the first time and together that incomparable view of San Marco from the western end of the Piazza. Star had read to her Ruskin’s description. “A multitude of pillars and white domes, clustered into a long, low pyramid of coloured light.” To stand together on the Piazzetta in the early morning and look across the shimmering water to San Giorgio Maggiore. It was a dream, as insubstantial as the crumbling city. But the hope of it had been worth steeling herself to ask Edwin for that loan.
    “And what did he say?” There was no chance now of softening that brutal negative, of erasing the whole humiliating episode from her memory.
    “He said no.”
    “I suppose you told him why you wanted it. It didn’t occur to you that we go away from here to be private, that our holidays are our own affair, that it might humiliate me to have Edwin Lorrimer know that I can’t afford to take you to Venice, even on a ten-day package tour.”
    “I didn’t.” She cried out in vehement protest, horrified to hear the crack in her voice, and feel the first hot, gritty tears. It was odd, she thought, that it was she who could cry. Star was the emotional, the vehement one. And yet Star never cried.
    “I didn’t tell him anything, except that I needed the money.”
    “How much?”
    She hesitated, wondering whether to lie. But she never lied to Star.
    “Five hundred pounds. I thought we might as well do it properly. I just told him that I badly needed five hundred pounds.”
    “So, not surprisingly, faced with that irrefutable argument, he declined to hand out. What exactly did he say?”
    “Only that grandmother had made her intentions perfectly plain in her will and that he had no intention of upsetting them. Then I said