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Mother’s a very good cook. Surely you haven’t forgotten that.’
    ‘Well, we won’t have an argument about it. You’re the one who’s got to eat the stuff. I will only say that in my day she couldn’t even boil a kettle.’
    He cut some faded-looking grapes off a bunch and put them in a dish on the tray with one of the newly-cleaned finger-bowls.
    ‘I shall have to go,’ David said, finishing his sherry.
    ‘It’s been very good of you to look in. I do greatly appreciate that. Please don’t bother to wash the glass. I’m glad to say that Mrs Whatshername will be here in the morning. She deigns to give us an hour or two on Fridays.’
    ‘Shall I carry up Aunt Sylvie’s tray?’
    ‘No, she will expect me to do that.’
    He could not say that Aunt Sylvie would not be pleased to see ‘that hussy’s boy’. David’s brief visits to her room raked up all her old grievances about his marriage to Midge.
    ‘I haven’t made the sippets yet,’ he added. He glanced at the clock, and then fetched a loaf from the larder.
    ‘Well, I’ll just nip up and say “Hallo”.’
    ‘I shouldn’t if I were you, dear boy. It’s her Italian day, and you know how rigid she is. And yours is so poor.’
    ‘Non-existent.’
    ‘Well – then…’
    On Mondays, his father and Aunt Sylvie spoke only in French to one another; on Thursdays, in Italian – to keep their tongues in, although David could not think for what. And why those particular days, he had not asked.
    ‘O.K., then. I’ll be dropping in again soon. Is that all you’re having, mince and toast?’
    ‘It’s ample for our ageing digestions,’ his father said. He had a nice, gentle smile, David thought, regarding him as the stranger he was.
    As he drove homewards, he suffered the by now familiar sensations of shame and pity and irritation. He was always relieved to escape from that house, where the old clocks ticked, the old hearts beat. He felt protective towards his father and was annoyed that he should do. Everything about Archie had been irksome, whether in the family or out of it, and especially in his way of leaving it; and he was amazed that his mother, easygoing though she was, could have borne his behaviour for sixteen or something years.
    When he reached home, he found her in an especially gay mood. ‘All that gin,’ he thought, refusing some. ‘I’ve been drinking sherry,’ he said.
    ‘Oh.’ This was all the comment she allowed herself, and it was after a hesitation. She knew where he had been, but would not refer to it. None the less, she let her gaiety underline the contrast between here and
there
, and dinner was especially delicious.
    So she could not even boil a kettle! David thought. His father’s memories were clouded by injustice. As he ate, he thought of the little dish of mince amongst all those giant tureens and ladles and silver-plated covers; and, after the mince, those two pecking at a few grapes, like sad old birds.

CHAPTER FOUR
     
    Cressy’s first steps towards freedom had not taken her very far from Quayne – only down the hill and into the village, making the reverse journey of Mrs Brindle’s.
    It was Mrs Brindle, in whom she often confided, who had found her the job at the antique shop on the Green. It was one she had been offered herself, but had been unable to take because of what she called ‘the poor remuneration’. In the village, she acted as a free employment bureau, always being able to place someone, or oblige someone else, knowing who could spare an hour or two, or sweep a chimney, or mend a teapot.
    The village was on a main road between London and the sea, and was dominated by motorists, the passing trade. With its black and white cottages and hollyhocks, the trim Green and the pond, its partly Saxon church, it was a place to run out to, or pause at – for tea at the Walnut Tree café, a drink at the Three Horseshoes, to stretch cramped legs with a little amble past the shops, all bright with paint and