When I first knew her she was a very pretty woman of sixty, with thick shining silver hair and fine features. I think she had probably been a beauty, but she was embarrassed by any compliments about her looks.

Her bedroom was unheated and so she liked to undress and prepare for bed before the fire in her sitting-room, a portioned part of the kitchen; but to do this she always turned off the television; she wouldn’t for the world undress in front of an actor in a play, an announcer, or one of the ministers of religion who uttered his few comfortable words at the end of the day.

Nor would Milly be seen walking with a man. She would certainly stop in the street and speak to a neighbouring male and would accompany a man she knew from the front door to his car, waving him good-bye. But she wouldn’t walk down the street or cross the road with him. She had been widowed ten years. She followed some rule of her early days, I imagined.