Over the way, in No. 4, Miss Garside-elderly, dignified, aloof. “Thinks herself somebody,” to quote Aunt Mabel. “And who is she anyway?” Well, Miss Garside was Miss Garside. She came of an intellectual family. She had what Mrs. Underwood stigmatised as “highbrow” tastes. Her figure and her ideas were equally unbending. The eyes which looked past her neighbours quite possibly saw the stars. Meade thought she might be anywhere, in any time. Not here. I wonder where she is now.

Easier to speculate about Mr. and Mrs. Willard in No. 5. She could picture him sleeping neatly, without a wrinkle in sheet or pillow. He would, of course, have taken his glasses off, but otherwise he would be just the same as when he was awake- dapper even in pyjamas, his hair unruffled, his gas-mask handy. Of all the people in the house, she could feel least sure that he would have escaped into a dream. Does a Civil Servant ever escape? Does he ever want to?

Mrs. Willard in the other twin bed with the bedside table between her and Mr. Willard. In the daytime both beds had spreads of rose-coloured art silk embroidered in a rather frightful pattern of blue and purple flowers which had never bloomed outside the designer’s imagination. Now at night they would be tidily folded up and put away. Mr. Willard would see to that.

It was not in Mrs. Willard to be neat. She had hair which had stopped being brown without getting on with the business of going grey. It had more ends than you would have thought possible, and they all stuck out in different directions. She had rather a London accent, and she wore the most distressing clothes, but she was nice. She called you “Dearie”, and somehow you didn’t mind. Where did she go to in her dreams? Meade thought it would be a nursery with lots of jolly children-something very small in a cot, twins in rompers, grubby little schoolboys bouncing in, a girl with a long fair plait… But Mrs. Willard hadn’t any children-she had never had any. Poor Mrs. Willard.