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"You can call it what you like. It's still going to be full of very odd people."

The shudder was audible down the telephone line. This had been more or less her objection to Helen going to art college, which she imagined to be peopled with bohemians, communists, and other degenerates. She had been slightly mollified when Helen emerged from the establishment, apparently uncorrupted, to take a teaching job in a girls' grammar school in Hertfordshire. This she regarded as a perfectly respectable stopgap until a husband came along, but this latest move was beyond all understanding.

"Weren't you happy at the school? I thought you liked it." 

"I did. But now I want to do something different."

"It'll be different all right. People in straitjackets thinking they're Napoleon."

"You have such a Victorian view of these things." Helen couldn't help laughing. "People get sick; we try to make them better, like any other hospital. In any case, it means I'll be moving to Croydon, much nearer to you and Clive." She offered this up as though greater proximity to her family had been a motivating factor, when it had in fact been rather the opposite.

"Croydon?" her mother mused, having raided her imagination for further psychiatric disorders and come away empty-handed. "I've an idea our Kathleen's husband works in a mental hospital in that part of the world. I wonder if it's the same one."

"Who's 'our Kathleen'?" asked Helen. Her mother came from a large family, its members estranged by distance and contrasting fortunes, and the name rang only the faintest of bells.

"My cousin Mary's youngest. Yes, I believe they live not far from Clive and June."

"And yet you never see them."

"Well, she's much younger than us. Closer to your age than mine. And we had a bit of a falling out with Mary when we didn't have Kathleen as a bridesmaid."

"But that was over forty years ago," Helen protested. "Surely they don't still bear a grudge."

"Oh, I'm sure it's all forgotten now. Although we weren't invited to Kathleen's wedding. We still sent a gift—a Royal Worcester cruet set from Selfridges. Not cheap." There was a pause. "We never got a thank you."

If Helen remembered this conversation, it was only for her mother's talent for nursing ancient slights and not for the original matter of her cousin's daughter's husband being a potential colleague at Westbury Park. By the time she started her new job it had completely slipped her mind and so when she had a telephone call one evening at her lodgings from a Kathleen Rudden, inviting her to dinner, it took more than a moment to make the connection.

The Ruddens lived in a Victorian villa in a suburban street backing onto the playing fields of a boys' school. A cricket match was in progress and Helen could hear the clop of a struck ball and the crackle of applause as she walked up the driveway, carrying a box of fruit jellies. The sweets had been a farewell gift from a pupil, kept for just such an opportunity as this. She had not pictured Gil, with his air of weary contempt for convention, in quite such genteel surroundings and it gave her courage. The discovery that he was not only married, but to a distant relative, had unsettled her.

Helen knew, without vanity, that she was good looking. The evidence was there in the mirror and in the attention, wanted and unwanted, that she regularly attracted from men. It was rare, though, for her to feel any interest in return. She had never been short of potential partners, but these relationships had always foundered at the point where the man proposed marriage, prompting a wave of claustrophobia and a determination to escape. She was sure she had not imagined the tiny electrical charge that passed between her and Gil at their first proper meeting in his office but, as things stood, he could hardly be more unavailable. It was disappointing, but having dismissed him as a romantic proposition, she resolved to take a purely anthropological interest in studying him in his domestic habitat.

The doorbell growled and a moment later a blurred figure appeared in the stained-glass panel of the front door, which was opened to reveal a slender woman in her mid-forties with blonde hair and a pink complexion, not quite tamed by powder.

"Hello," she said, sticking out one leg to impede, momentarily, the escape of a tabby cat. "I'm Kathleen. Come in." She held up a glass, empty apart from a chewed semicircle of lemon rind. "We're already on the gin." Looking over Helen's shoulder, she took in the scooter parked at the kerb. "You came on a motorbike!" she said in admiring tones.

"Oh, hardly. Just a little Vespa. Goes about as fast as a milk float." 

"Handy for nipping about, I should think. Better than our Zephyr. It's such a beast to park. I can't see over the bonnet."