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‘I thought the bobbing for apples had better be in the library. The carpet’s old there and a lot of water always gets spilt, anyway.’

‘All right. We’ll take them along. Rowena, here’s another basket of apples.’

‘Let me help,’ said Mrs Oliver.

She picked up the two apples at her feet. Almost without noticing what she was doing, she sank her teeth into one of them and began to crunch it. Mrs Drake abstracted the second apple from her firmly and restored it to the basket. A buzz of conversation broke out.

‘Yes, but where are we going to have the Snap dragon?’

‘You ought to have the Snapdragon in the library, it’s much the darkest room.’

‘No, we’re going to have that in the dining-room.’

‘We’ll have to put something on the table first.’

‘There’s a green baize to put on that and then the rubber sheet over it.’

‘What about the looking-glasses? Shall we really see our husbands in them?’

Surreptitiously removing her shoes and still quietly champing at her apple, Mrs oliver lowered herself once more on to the settee and surveyed the room full of people critically. She was thinking in her authoress’s mind: ‘Now, if I was going to make a book about all these people, how should I do it? They’re nice people, I should think, on the whole, but who knows?’

In a way, she felt, it was rather fascinating not to know anything about them. They all lived in Woodleigh Common, some of them had faint tags attached to them in her memory because of what Judith had told her. Miss Johnson— something to do with the church, not the vicar’s sister. Oh no, it was the organist’s sister, of course. Rowena Drake, who seemed to run things in Woodleigh Common. The puffing woman who had brought in the pail, a particularly hideous plastic pail. But then Mrs Oliver had never been fond of plastic things. And then the children, the teenage girls and boys.

So far they were really only names to Mrs Oliver. There was a Nan and a Beatrice and a Cathie, a Diana and a Joyce, who was boastful and asked questions. I don’t like Joyce much, thought Mrs Oliver. A girl called Ann, who looked tall and superior. There were two adolescent boys who appeared to have just got used to trying out different hair styles, with rather unfortunate results.

A smallish boy entered in some condition of shyness.

‘Mummy sent these mirrors to see if they’d do,’ he said in a slightly breathless voice.

Mrs Drake took them from him.

‘Thank you so much, Eddy,’ she said.

‘They’re just ordinary looking hand-mirrors,’ said the girl called Ann. ‘Shall we really see our future husbands’ faces in them?’

‘Some of you may and some may not,’ said Judith Butler.

‘Did you ever see your husband’s face when you went to a party—I mean this kind of a party?’

‘Of course she didn’t,’ said Joyce.

‘She might have,’ said the superior Beatrice. ‘E.S.P. they call it. Extra sensory perception,’ she added in the tone of one pleased with being thoroughly conversant with the terms of the times.