Not my cup of tea at all, but I read all the time. I would read anything. I suppose I am what you’d call “chronically literary” – the kind of person who, when the rhododendrons are in bloom, will amble round Kew Gardens reading the labels on the trees!’ Suddenly she became serious. ‘Reading is my life. I used to feel quite apocalyptic about things, human existence in general, but books saved my life. My sanity. If I didn’t read, I might have turned into a monster. Honestly.’

For some reason Ingrid looked extremely tense now, very much on edge – just as a cat is supposed to be minutes before a devastating earthquake, Antonia thought. Was Ingrid afraid that Beatrice was saying too much – giving away too much? Beatrice was voluble in a way that suggested a degree of instability. Was her interest in multiple personality disorder of any significance? The two women seemed totally incompatible in terms of sociability, but then Beatrice hinted at things one shouldn’t really be talking about in front of total strangers.

Aloud Antonia said, ‘Yes. Reading is the most wonderful of panaceas.’

Did people think of their favourite authors as of close friends? Antonia admired a number of writers but, if she ever were to meet them, she wouldn’t dream of talking to them about, say, her failed first marriage and how she nearly suffered a nervous breakdown as a result, or how she left her librarian job at the Military Club to do full-time writing, or about her second husband selling his Sussex farm and moving in with her in Hampstead. Certainly not on first meeting them!

‘There’s a speculative glint in your eye.’ Beatrice leant forward. ‘Shall I tell you what I think? I think you are going to put us in your next book.’

‘I never do that kind of thing,’ Antonia said with a smile, not entirely truthfully, because, somewhere at the back of her mind, she had already been considering the two women from a writer’s point of view, as potential characters.