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required, and sent their bills on to the House of Commons. Stella had never even needed to change a lightbulb. It was, she thought, like living in the sort of hotel whose barely visible management pretended it was an ordinary home.
    Now she wandered through the sitting room and the kitchen, wanting something, but not knowing what that was. She picked up the book that she had been reading—Elizabeth Taylor’s first novel—and put it down again. She wondered about telephoning a friend. By then it was after six; she could legitimately suppose that it was time to change for dinner.
    Almost all of Stella knew exactly what that evening had in store. But a fraction of her could still feel faintly hopeful.Interesting people turned up in the least likely of places, even at a dinner in a nearby country house held in support of an appeal to raise money for the local staghounds. She and Rufus had to be there; he was a great friend of the host’s and, besides, he was in favor of the Countryside Alliance.
    Dressing for the evening has a ritual quality about it, Stella thought. As for a priestess in an Attic temple preparing for sacrifice, there were ceremonial adornments to put on in a special order. She looked at herself carefully in the bathroom mirror. Brushing shadow onto her eyelids, underlining them with charcoal gray, she saw a face that did not entirely fit her own. Something had been lost behind those dark-fringed eyes but she did not know what it was.
    That night, a little later, Mary-Margaret O’Reilly accepted a cup of tea from a ward assistant and stretched out luxuriously in her bed. Beneath her the white cotton sheet slithered against the plastic-covered mattress. She had seen the doctor, who had said she could go home. Her head was mending well and the nurse at her local GP practice could take her stitches out next week. Her wrist needed only to be kept strapped up. The doctor had sounded jolly and encouraging, sure that he was the bringer of good news. Mary-Margaret had not the heart to tell him she’d much rather stay where she was for the next week or so. She liked the companionship of the mixed ward, the old fella who always stopped at the foot of her bed to pass the time of day on his way to and from the toilets; Myrna, who knew the secretsof so many celebrated hearts—film stars and football players’ wives and that girl who was on Big Brother —and had, in addition, the blessing of a great many cheerful grandchildren who brightened up the place no end. She liked the high and narrow bed and its white-painted bars. She liked being given a jug of water with a special lid. It was a very pleasant change to have her meals served to her, food that she had neither had to buy nor to cook. She liked the gravy, thick and shiny as melted caramel, the pats of butter like little bars of treasure in their wrappings of gold. No, she was not yet ready to give these comforts up. Of course she burned to be with Him again. But at the same time she felt a curious need to let more time elapse. When Sister came round in the morning, Mary-Margaret decided, she would tell her how badly her head pained her and how she really should be left to rest.
    In another narrow bed, this one the bottom half of a bunk, Felix Morrison was thinking about British Summer Time. Spring forward, fall back. In the middle of the night he would lose a whole hour of his life, but that didn’t really add up to much, if you did the maths. How many hours had he lived already? Twenty-four times three hundred and sixty-five times ten, and seven months—well, he could do that in his head; just about, it came to ninety-two thousand, six hundred, and forty, or something, but then there were uneven months and leap years, how many of those had there been in his lifetime? Years divisible by four: 2000, 2004, 2008—add twenty-four times these. Hold on, of course, you’d get the lost hours back when theclocks changed again in winter. So maybe it was a pointless