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make?’
    Mrs Cheng put the pill bottles back.
    â€˜Good ‘nough for you.’
    â€˜Love a woman with spirit,’ Leonard said. ‘Love a bit of fight. Kate’s got spirit. D’you think she thinks James and Old Bat Bachelor have too much in common as to age? Hah!’
    â€˜You older than either,’ Mrs Cheng said. ‘You more trouble than all put together.’
    Leonard looked pleased. ‘You bet I am. Where’s my coffee? It’s ten past eleven. What does Kate pay you for, you useless peasant?’
    Mrs Cheng picked up her dusters and cloths and began to wind the flex round the Hoover handle.
    â€˜I paid double,’ she said, ‘to put up with you .’
    Miss Bachelor kept the very dull biscuits she offered James with his coffee in an octagonal tin patterned with vaguely oriental herons and peonies. It was a very battered tin, as battered as everything else in Miss Bachelor’s crammed, first-floor bed-sitting-room, except for her precious radio, which was brand-new, and on which she could, to her delight, get the BBC World Service during her long, sleepless nights.
    Her room was not only crammed, but cheerless. She had no more idea of how to make it charming than she had of how to dress, and she calmly knew it. ‘As you observe,’ she said to James, ‘I seem to have no practical visual sense. The rapture I feel in seeing beautiful things is something I am quite unable to translate into my life.’ Her furniture was either late-Victorian, heavy and overbearing, or what James’s mother would have called boarding-house, gimcrack and slightly fancy, overlaid with a varnish like thin gravy. Her bed had a counterpane of tired maroon candlewick, and her unwelcoming chairs were covered in terrible blankets of sewn-together crochet squares, in the screaming colours associated with acrylic paint. The carpet was muddy, the sad curtains unlined; only the walls relieved the ugliness, being covered with postcards and larger reproductions of all the Italian works of art Miss Bachelor so loved – paintings by Bellini and Giorgione, statues by Michelangelo, bas reliefs by Ghiberti and della Robbia.
    Miss Bachelor’s sister-in-law owned the house in Cardigan Street, and allowed her the room. She had opened the door to James three times by now. She was a depressed, grim woman, a widow, who lived only for her hypochondria. She resented Beatrice’s cleverness, just as she had resented her husband’s, and for Beatrice to have a personable male caller bringing sherry and a pot of hyacinth bulbs just coming into flower was a fine cause for fresh resentment.
    â€˜Mrs Bachelor,’ said James heartily to her on the third visit. ‘How exceptionally well you’re looking.’
    â€˜You will have annoyed her exceedingly,’ Beatrice said.
    â€˜Will she take it out on you?’
    â€˜She will try. She will hide my butter or shut my cat out, but I have developed a mantle of imperviousness to defend myself. It irritates her beyond all telling.’
    Beatrice had several dark bruises on her legs, visible through her unlovely stockings. James had vowed he would keep coming until those bruises had vanished. After the first few minutes of the first visit, Beatrice had said she didn’t want the accident referred to again.
    â€˜It involved us both in a loss of dignity, and we shall only suffer it anew if we remind ourselves of it.’
    She was tremendously pleased with the hyacinths, and shy about the sherry. ‘There was a period in my life,’ she said unexpectedly, ‘when I drank a great deal of it, a very great deal. It coincided with a time of going to Greece alone, and of having adventures. The memory of that time is rather – stimulating. But it disconcerts me too.’
    James leaned forward. ‘What adventures?’
    Beatrice looked away.
    â€˜Lorry drivers?’ said James.
    Beatrice said nothing.
    â€˜Oh Miss