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knee and seeing the damage for the first time. She was a long while putting herself to rights. Her leg throbbed, and stiffness was setting in.
    When at last she came down to the lounge, Mrs Burton had already rung the bell and Mrs Arbuthnot was waiting impatiently for her library book.
    ‘I had begun to think you were lost,’ she said.
    ‘I’m afraid I had a fall on my way back and had to bathe my leg.’
    ‘It looks as if my library-book has had a fall, too.’
    ‘I’m sorry. I dropped it. But I have tried to sponge it.’
    ‘Well, it was none the less very kind of you. Are you all right now?’ Mrs Arbuthnot asked the question lightly, as she began to turn the leaves of the book.
    ‘Only a little stiff. All the same, I think I shall have a glass of sherry before dinner.’
    She limped towards the bar, and Mrs Arbuthnot watched her go, as if to a damnation of her own choosing.

    When he had finished the spaghetti, Ludo took his suit from the back of the door and went round to thelaunderette. Under the harsh light, he sat and wrote up some notes, describing a young man sitting alone in a launderette at night. Sometimes, he stared gloomily across at his suit turning slowly over and over in the dry-cleaning machine, which looked as if it were trying to digest it, and would have disgorged it if it could.

CHAPTER FOUR

    O N Saturday evening, Mrs Palfrey put on her best beaded dress and sprinkled lavender-water on her handkerchief. Before going downstairs, she took a sealed envelope from a drawer and slipped it into her handbag. Although her movements were slow and deliberate, she felt flurried and anxious.
    It was on Thursday evening that she had told the waiter – well within Mrs Arbuthnot’s hearing – that she expected a guest to dinner on Saturday.
    ‘So your grandson is coming to see you at last,’ Mrs Arbuthnot had said on her slow way past Mrs Palfrey’s table and, for some reason she searched for later, Mrs Palfrey let her go without a word.
    It was the first time since she had become a widow that she had been involved in an untruth. In fact, since early childhood, she had not lied at all except on her husband’s behalf – to get Arthur out of cocktail parties which he abhorred, or to stave off importunate natives when he was tired. Now – by omission – she was trying to get away with what she thought of as a whopper, and she wondered if either she or Ludo would be equal to it.
    He had seemed ready enough to fall in with her; had had no scruples as she herself had; had thought it all rather a lark.
    She had tracked him down in Harrods Banking Hall.He was reclining in his comfortable chair, beautifully warm – and it was a bitter, gusty afternoon – scribbling away, oblivious to the slack or tense resting bodies about him. Nervously, Mrs Palfrey approached him, stood before him and coughed. His eyes, when he raised his head, seemed still to be viewing another world, an inner world in which he had been alone.
    ‘I am sorry to interrupt you,’ Mrs Palfrey said, more put out than ever by his dazed look.
    He stood up then, with a fan of papers in his hand. He smiled.
    There was a vacant chair next to him and she sat down and began to speak of her plan in a low and hesitant voice. He soon grasped what she was suggesting and took her side at once against Mrs Arbuthnot and her dreaded condescensions. ‘I let her go without a word,’ Mrs Palfrey said. ‘And now it is too late.’ She looked about her at the resting shoppers, and felt a deep embarrassment at what she had had to say; but it was nothing to the humiliation Mrs Arbuthnot would have had her suffer. In just being with Ludo, she felt a certain ease.
    He had listened to her with a curious expression on his face, as if he could not believe his ears: his eyebrows had shot up and stayed there. He was almost beautiful, she thought, and the idea so alarmed her that her glance flew away from his face and fastened on one of his shoes, as it swung back