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sitting-room for a cup of tea and a reading.
    Aurora wore her long blonde hair in a tight bun and swept along the school corridors wearing floral-print dresses. She was forty-five but looked older. Once, she thought she heard the voice of Emily Brontë calling to her when she visited Haworth Parsonage in Yorkshire, with a group of her students, but it might have been only the wind moaning over the moors.
    They had no children. Aurora was too busy for that, and Henry’s days were filled with dreams of a prestigious publishing deal that never came true. Aurora often commented that Henry was not as tall as he used to be, and Henry assumed that this was due to his disappointment in life in general.
    Now Aurora was embarking on her most ambitious plan to date. She was going to have an enormous conservatory built on to the back of the house. She planned to hold the society meetings in it. The Brontë Bunch was growing in popularity. The Irish News wrote an article about the society for their culture section, and in the days that followed, a small mountain of letters dropped through Aurora’s letterbox. There were twenty people in the society already, and another fifty new applications. Aurora sorted through them carefully. She did not want any social climbers or lonely hearts milling around her Victorian mansion on the Malone Road, or eating her iced cakes and cucumber sandwiches.
    Henry Blackstaff did not like the man who came to the house to give them a quotation. He thought that Arnold Smith was oily and brash, and he had a habit of touching things that did not belong to him. Henry remembered that the man had picked up an antique vase and inspected the underside of it, before setting it down again in the wrong place. Henry wanted to ask Arnold Smith to leave the house at once and never come back, but unfortunately Walley Windows and Conservatories of Distinction were the only firm in Belfast who could build the huge conservatory that Aurora wanted. Henry remembered that day in photographic detail. That was the day his whole life changed.
    “I don’t like that man. He’s a greasy little charlatan,” said Henry, when Arnold Smith’s blue Jaguar went silently down the tarmac driveway. “He’ll say anything to get a sale. ‘Are you an actress, Mrs Blackstaff? Your face is so familiar…’ He must think we are idiots!”
    “He is a colourful character, I’ll give you that,” said Aurora. “But one must expect a little drama from these trade types.”
    “When will we know how much they are going to charge for this white elephant? That’s what I want to know. I don’t see why you couldn’t just rent a hall. Or meet in a pub and have a few drinks while you’re at it. That’s what other people do in these situations. In these clubs.”
    “Henry, dear, I cannot hold the meetings in some dim and draughty hall or in a smoke-filled public-house, with drunken males swearing in the background. The atmosphere would be entirely wrong. It is not simply a book club. It is more than that. It is a society.”
    “Oh, pardon me! A society, no less.”
    “Yes, indeed. And a society calls for dignity, Henry dear. A conservatory will be the answer to all our problems. We will have plenty of room to spread out, and you won’t have to run away and hide in that little tea house of yours.”
    “Well, you know I can’t stand them all. Especially Mrs Johnson, trying to look like Queen Victoria with her fingerless gloves and her silly black cloak.”
    “Stop making such a fuss, Henry. Honestly, you are quite obsessed with Mrs Johnson and her darling cloak. That garment is a genuine piece of Victoriana, a family heirloom, if you must know. What a fantastic eccentric she is! We might all attend in costume some day. That is an excellent idea, though I say so myself. Now, be a dear, and brew a pot of tea. I want to read over these brochures before dinner.”
    After dinner, they had a blazing row. That was when Aurora told Henry that most