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Braeside façade. Of all the houses in the street it was the only one whose occupants had never troubled to improve its appearance. Susan was no admirer of rustic gnomes, of carriage lamps or birdbaths on Doric pediments, but she recognised a desire for individuality in the Gibbs’s potted bay tree, a wistful need of beauty in the O’Donnells’ window boxes.
    Braeside was as stark now as it must have been when it was first built ten years before. Since that time it had never been painted and the perpetually closed windows looked as if they would never open. The house belonged to the Norths and yet it had an air of property rented on a short lease as if its owners regarded it as a place of temporary sojourn rather than a home.
    No trees had been planted in the front garden. Almost every other house had a kanzan or cypresses or a prunus. The Braeside garden was just a big square of earth planted entirely with daffodils and with a few inches of turf bordering it. The daffodils looked as if they were grown by a market gardener to sell, they stood in such straight rows. But Louise never even cut them. Susan could remember how in springs gone by she had sometimes seen her neighbour walk carefully between the rows to touch the waxen green leaves or stoop to smell the fresh and faintly acrid scent of their blossoms.
    They were as yet only in bud, each tightly folded yellow head as sealed as the house itself and, like it, seeming to hold secrets.
    Susan called the children and hustled them in through the side gate. The Braeside windows looked black and opaque, effective shutters for a woman to hide behind and cry her eyes out.
    Coping repressively with Doris’s curiosity and trying to give Paul an adequate but necessarily untruthful answer to his question as to why Mrs North had been crying, left Susan exhausted and cross. She badly needed someone with whom she could discuss this crisis in the Norths’ lives and she thought rather wistfully of how Doris must be now regaling John with its latest phase. A man would see the whole matter more straightforwardly—and less subtly—than she could; a man would advise how to avoid involvement with kindness and tact.
    When the phone rang at seven-thirty she knew it must be Julian and for a moment she thought seriously of casting her troubles on his shoulders. If only Julian were more human, less the counterpart of an actor playing a brittle role in an eternal drawing-room comedy! And since his new marriage he had grown even more suave and witty and in a way unreal. Contemptuous he had always been, misanthropic and exclusive, besides having this odd conviction of his that dwellers in a suburb were quite alien to himself, sub-human creatures leading a vegetable or troglodyte existence. He was indifferent to their activities, although the doings of his own circle often aroused in him an almost feminine curiosity, and as soon as Susan heard his voice her hopes went. Consulting Julian would be only to invite a scathing rebuff.
    â€˜You said this was the most convenient time,’ said the drawling pedantic voice, ‘so, since I aim to please, I’ve dragged myself away in the middle of my prawn cocktail.’
    â€˜Hallo, Julian.’
    His habit of plunging into the middle of things without greeting, preamble or announcing who he was, always irritated her. Of course an ex-wife might be expected to recognise her ex-husband’s voice; that was fair enough. But Susan knew he did it to everyone, to the remotest acquaintance. In his own estimation he was unique, and it was unthinkable to him that even the deaf or the phone-shy could mistake him for anyone else.
    â€˜How are you?’
    â€˜I am well.’ This strictly correct but unidiomatic reply was another Julianism. He was never ‘fine’ or even ‘very well’. ‘How are things in Matchdown Park?’
    â€˜Much the same,’ said Susan, bracing herself for the sneer.
    â€˜I