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tall grey-haired spinster who had formerly worked in the haberdashery department of one of the big Kensington stores. But she had found the long mornings, standing about with nothing much to do, boring and exhausting, and had turned to housework, for which she had a natural talent and which nowadays did not seem to be regarded as in any way degrading. Probably because of her connection with haberdashery she had a passion for small gadgets and ‘daintiness’, as she put it, which was encouraged by the advertisements on commercial television with their emphasis on this aspect of life. She did not care for men, with their roughness and lack of daintiness, though the clergy were excepted, unless they smoked pipes. She herself liked a filter-tipped cigarette with a cup of tea or coffee, and she sat smoking one now, while Dulcie made Nescafe at the stove.
    ‘I tried a new place for lunch today,’ she said.
    ‘Oh? “What did you have?’ Miss Lord always told Dulcie exactly what she had eaten for lunch on the days when she came in the afternoon.
    ‘Egg on welsh and a Russian cream,’ said Miss Lord. ‘Quite nice, really.’
    ‘It sounds…’ Dulcie hesitated for a word – ‘ delicious ,’ she pronounced with rather more emphasis than she had intended. ‘What exactly is Russian cream?’
    ‘It’s a kind of mousse with a sponge base and jelly on the top,’ said Miss Lord. ‘The jelly can be red, yellow or orange.’ She finished her coffee. ‘Were you going to throw these flowers away? Unsightly, aren’t they.’ She bundled up some slimy-stalked zinnias and dahhas in The Times Literary Supplement and went out to the dustbin with them.
    ‘The garden’s looking lovely,’ she said as she came back. ‘Will you be cutting some fresh flowers for these vases?’
    ‘Yes, later,’ said Dulcie, ‘but I must do something about the plums. I’ve been worrying about them all the week-end.’
    ‘Oh, a garden’s a responsibility,’ sighed Miss Lord. ‘The fruits of the earth… Harvest festival soon. Will you be sending something along to the church?’ she asked deliberately.
    The same question was asked every autumn and the same answer given, for Dulcie was not a regular churchgoer and Miss Lord was.
    ‘I don’t think so,’ Dulcie said, ‘but if you’d like to take anything, please do. Plums or apples, and flowers, of course.’
    ‘So kind of you, Miss Mainwaring. Of course we have no garden and one does like to do one’s bit. I suppose I could bake a loaf, but anything to do with yeast is so troublesome, isn’t it. One never knows… A year or two ago we did have a loaf in church, quite a beautiful thing, a fancy shape, plaited. But do you know,’ she lowered her voice, ‘it was made of plaster . I thought that very wrong. You couldn’t send a plaster loaf to the hospital, could you.’
    ‘I suppose not – it would indeed be a case of asking for bread and being given a stone.’
    ‘Well, Miss Mainwaring, it would be being given plaster, wouldn’t it. It was when we had the new vicar, the one who wanted us to call him Father – that, on top of the plaster loaf! Well, we com-plained to the Bishop, and could you blame us?’
    ‘No, change is a bad thing on the whole,’ said Dulcie. ‘You know that my niece Laurel is coming to live here soon, don’t you?’
    ‘Your sister’s eldest child? Yes, Miss Mainwaring, you did mention it. Which room is she to have?’
    ‘I thought the big back room would be best.’
    ‘The room Mrs Mainwaring had?’ asked Miss Lord in a hushed tone.
    ‘Yes, I think it’s better that it should be used again now. I thought we might do something about it the next time you come. We could put the big bed in the spare room and move in one of the divans; and then she will want a bookcase.’
    ‘All this reading,’ said Miss Lord. ‘I used to like a book occasionally, but I don’t get time for it now.’
    ‘I took my degree in English Literature,’ said Dulcie, almost