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Colonial Bank. Louise married after a brief courtship and gave birth to a baby boy. Overjoyed to see her younger daughter so finely established, Mum grew visibly worried when Clarice, unmarried and at home, passed the age of thirty. She never came at the subject directly, but often enthused over the beauty of Louise’s little Ron and the ample satisfactions of motherhood. She imagined, she said, that Clarice must be looking forward to having her own family, and once asked about the existence of a male friend. Never having learned to confide in her mother, Clarice fairly effortlessly avoided any invitation to do so.
    Louise and Mum did confide in one another, however, and between them they cooked up the scheme of bringing together Clarice and Stanley, a close friend of Louise’s Ted. Clarice had met Stanley at Louise’s engagement party and at the wedding, and Louise had reported dryly that he thought Clarice a beauty. Clarice had nothing against him. He seemed affable, but somehow her mind slid right over him; she had trouble remembering what he looked like.
    Then he came to the house with Louise and Ted, the three of them dropping by, artificially casual, just after Clarice and her parents had finished a stodgy Sunday lunch.
    Finding herself alone with Stanley in the dining room and feeling obliged to say something, Clarice inquired after his work. He was a furniture maker. This aroused her interest, because she had respect for manual work and, thinking of building herself a painting cart, she wanted advice. She explained how the cart had to function and, after some puzzlement on his side, a rather intense conversation ensued. By the end of it, Clarice was holding a sheet of paper on which Stanley had drawn a diagram of her cart in its stages of assemblage and written her a list of instructions. She had thanked him warmly. Excited by the idea of her cart, she had not stopped to consider that the enthusiasm she was seeing in Stanley, his livening face and pell-mell sentences, might have been the result of something other than professional interest.
    â€˜I could make it for you,’ he said. ‘Otherwise. I’d be happy to. It’d be no bother. None at all.’
    His cheeks were flushed and there was a patina of triumph in his eyes. She had encouraged him; he felt they had arrived at a new intimacy.
    This unfortunate impression was confirmed by Mum a few days later, over breakfast, after Father had gone out for his stroll. ‘Stanley wants to start a family, you know. He’s tired of being a single man. He told Ted.’
    â€˜Oh?’
    â€˜Yes. The furniture business is doing very well and now he finally has time to think about his personal life.’
    â€˜That’s good, I suppose.’ Clarice poured them each a second cup of tea that would have a bitter aftertaste.
    â€˜I’m not at my best this morning.’
    â€˜No? In what way?’
    â€˜A bit tired. Exhausted, really. It must be my heart.’ Mum suffered from a weak heart, as her mother had. It was believed that Clarice did too, although she herself considered this an improbable piece of family lore: she had never felt remotely weak of heart. Mum smiled gently. ‘It’s affecting me more these days. Dr Broadbent told me it would, as I got older. Of course, I haven’t been the same since your brother.’
    It was unusual for Mum to talk of Paul, who had ended his own life ten years previously in the asylum at Kew. After the initial shock, his name had very rarely been spoken in the house—even less than during his two years in the ‘hospital’. There had always been a great silence around Paul, as if it could have been capable of cocooning the unexplainably odd kernel of him. Since he had passed on, Mum mentioned her heart more often, this was true, and perhaps did seem more fragile.
    â€˜You should take it easy today, then. Rest yourself.’
    â€˜He’s a nice young man, Stanley.