“I hope I don’t have to remind you again,” he said, speaking slowly and clearly as if to a slow-witted servant. “You must not interrupt me when I’m in the study. Never. Understand?”

She shut her eyes and listened to the roaring in her ears. She heard his footsteps receding, the door opening and closing. She rested her head in her arm. Her body was a dark continent like Africa, she thought, full of strange peoples and unexplored places, a source of plunder for greedy men. She tried to make her mind empty, like the Sahara Desert, a perfect vacancy.

Time passed. On the mantel, the horrible French clock that Marcus’s parents had inherited from some dusty Langstone great-aunt ticked like a metronome. The pains in her cheek throbbed obediently in time with it. The Langstones controlled even her pain. She thought her cheek might be bleeding but did not want to find out.

At one point the men went downstairs. Fisher was saying something. He had been plain Mr. Fisher when Lydia had met him at Monkshill. Just out of the army. His father had done rather well out of the war, she remembered, and Lloyd George had given him a baronetcy-or more probably sold him one. The old man had died a couple of years ago and Fisher had come into the title. Prickly, Marcus said, and he might be right. The nouveaux riches always looked for slights where none existed.

Left to herself, she might have stayed there forever with her eyes fast shut. It was only the thought of the servants that made her move. Sooner or later the maid would come in to draw the curtains and light the fire, and the kettle would go on the range downstairs in the basement, ready for someone to ring for tea. She couldn’t face the servants. She couldn’t face anyone. She stood up, swaying, and opened her eyes. The light was already fading out of the short November afternoon. She went upstairs to her bedroom.