The Thoughts and Happenings of Wilfred P

3

The Red Dictionary


The bar of Narberth Rugby Club was straining with the mountainous bodies of the rugby team. The walls were lined with ancient team photographs and there were silver trophies proudly and confidently displayed in glass cabinets. Wilfred had come for a swift half before lunch.

‘Price is here!’ someone roared.

‘The handsome bugger’s come to bury us!’

‘Well done, lads,’ Wilfred called back, raising his hand in greeting and referring to the morning’s win against St Clears.

‘They didn’t stand a chance,’ the tighthead prop replied. ‘You should have seen them – like gnomes they were!’

Jeffrey, Wilfred’s old schoolfriend, came up to him with a pint of pale ale.

‘Wilfred Price – you bugger!’ enjoined Jeffrey, patting him on the back and handing him his drink. ‘I’ve heard the latest – congratulations! You never even mentioned you were seeing Grace Reece.’

‘No,’ said Wilfred cautiously.

‘All right, you two?’ said a man, shoving past and spilling beer.

‘All right, Sidney? You back to the Army soon?’ asked Jeffrey.

‘That’s right,’ Sidney replied curtly, walking by and getting lost in the throng.

‘Never liked that Sidney,’ Jeffrey confided to Wilfred, ‘too fly for me. So,’ he continued, supping ale, ‘I heard the news you’re marrying her.’

‘No, no.’

‘But Mrs Evans at the Conduit Stores said.’

‘Wilfred Price!’ hailed Norman Collins from a nearby table. ‘Have a pint before you get to the altar.’

‘No, Collins,’ Wilfred rejoined, waving his hand.

‘So, then you’s not marrying her?’ Jeffrey queried, looking up at Wilfred.

‘No …’

‘But you asked her?’

‘Yes,’ said Wilfred guiltily. There was a sudden round of applause from the players at the bar.

‘Nice legs on her,’ Jeffrey commented, adding somewhat doubtfully, ‘Nice legs isn’t everything, mind.’

‘No, that’s exactly what I thought myself.’

‘Was she upset?’

‘Yes. I feel dreadful about it.’

‘Nothing is simple,’ said Jeffrey, stroking the red whiskers of his droopy moustache. ‘Mind, you would have had Doctor Reece as your father-in-law.’ Jeffrey nudged him. ‘That would have been a barrel of laughs. Would have been like living with Moses.’ After a pause, he asked, ‘You all right, Wilf?’

‘Aye.’

‘That’s what happens, you see,’ Jeffrey said, sipping his pint, ‘when you spend all your time locked up with corpses in a workshop making coffins; you’s like a child in a sweetshop the moment you sees the fairer sex.’

Wilfred wiped the froth from his mouth with the back of his hand; the beer was warm, familiar and comforting.

‘True enough.’

‘Now you’ll have to tell the whole of Narberth.’

‘No, I won’t – now that I’ve told you,’ retorted Wilfred.

‘Come to the Young Farmers’ dance with me next Friday,’ Jeffrey offered. ‘There’s a charabanc of girls coming from Llawhaden.’

‘They’ll be straight back in the charabanc when they sees you.’

‘Well, you’d be lucky if they let you bury them!’

‘You still seeing Elizabeth?’ asked Wilfred.

‘No, seeing Clementine.’

‘Clementine?’

‘Everything changes,’ said Jeffrey.

‘Come again?’ mouthed Wilfred, nodding towards the rugby players in the corner who were freshly showered, rosy-faced and shiny, all proudly wearing their blue Narberth Otter ties. It was like a room full of bellowing, huffing prize bulls, Wilfred thought as the men erupted, for no apparent reason, into a body-shaking, heart-bursting rendition of ‘Hen Wlad fy Nhadau’.



Back in the workshop, Wilfred removed the lid of an empty coffin. There, stowed under a bundle of linen winding sheets, was a hessian bag. Wilfred guessed correctly that no one, not even a thief, would have the courage to open the lid of a closed coffin in a chapel of rest. Barclays Bank was in the High Street but Wilfred didn’t believe in interest, debt and security. Instead, their money was kept in two coarse hessian bags – one here, the other one hidden under the floorboards beneath his bed.

In the scully he took his da’s spade from the kitchen chair and sat down. Mr Auden had taught him about money: ‘We’ve buried some rich old buggers. Spend it while you can. But save some too – life is very unexpected.’ So each time Wilfred was paid for a funeral he strove to put aside a third, and discreetly, slowly and steadily, his savings had grown. Mr Auden had also advised him that, when he had completed his apprenticeship – was solvent – he must take a wife.

Wilfred cleared a space on the table, upended the bag and let the money topple out. Coins clattered down and notes fluttered around. He piled the money together, brushing his bare arm along the table to gather it when, unexpectedly, an image of Flora came into his mind’s eye. He paused for a moment, struck by an unexpected sense of her nearness.

A few coins had fallen on to the flagstones so he got down on all fours under the table to pick them up, and he was there when his da walked in.

‘Hang on – another ha’penny’s fallen next to those dumbbells, Wilf. And one by that snail in the corner.’

‘Thanks, Da.’

‘There’s a hell of a mess on this table,’ his da commented, taking off his cap. ‘What’s wrong with using the Barclays Bank? You usually like to be modern.’

‘No, Da, I’s not putting our hard-earned savings in the bank. Goodness knows what they do with it. Safer under the bed. Or in a coffin.’

‘But the bank manager is a God-fearing Calvinist. He goes to church three times on a Sunday.’

‘No doubt about it, Da. But I’m not trusting our money to a bank. Mark my words. I’s read the newspaper every day, Da. And the Bible.’

‘Wilfred! You don’t read the Bible from one year to the next.’

‘Well, I’s remember what it says: Neither a borrower nor a lender be.

‘Where’s that in the Bible, then?’

‘Don’t know. Sermon on the Mount?’ Wilfred speculated, rummaging for guineas and piling them up in groups of five.

Wilfred’s da fished a sixpence out of the remains of a bowl of soup.

‘I can always dig at St Issell’s graveyard,’ he said. ‘They have a lot of deaths that way from the coalmine at Bonville Court – when they’re not on strike.’

‘No, Da. You dig for Narberth, that’s plenty for you. I’ll look after you.’ Wilfred collected the half-crowns together. ‘I could put up my charges,’ he said, running his hand through his hair, ‘but I don’t like to, what with times being hard and getting harder … I’s need a new pair of trousers, my other ones are worn through. And a pair of socks. I could buy them from Mrs Russell’s Haberdasher’s and Draper’s this month. Or I might be able to wait for another month or two.’

‘Ask Auntie Blodwen to mend them for you.’

‘I have. But she’s already darned them five times. She said she wouldn’t do it again and that I should buy a brand new pair. Anyone would think we were made of money.’

‘I thinks she was cross because you don’t wash them properly. Said they were stiff with dirt, like cardboard, and she didn’t want to touch them.’

‘Well, there’s fussy! I have a clean pair every day – it must be the floor that’s dirty. And no one ever died of stink.’

The higgledy-piggledy pile of money was being turned into exact piles of coins and notes.

‘You not going out today?’ his da asked.

‘No, thought I’d stay in.’ Wilfred was waiting for the talk of him and Grace to die down a little and for some other choicer gossip to replace it before going out and about too much.

He jotted down some numbers on the back cover of the Undertaker’s Journal and totted them up.

‘Five, ten, fifteen, twenty,’ he counted to himself. ‘We’ll be all right now, Da, don’t worry, even if no one pops their clogs for two or three months – and someone surely will.’

‘Mustn’t be thinking too much about money, Wilfred. It’s not the be-all and end-all.’

‘But it is important. And we have this now – this is for us. And it means we can look after ourselves, and not worry.’

But Wilfred did worry. Wilfred who, as a child, was always starving hungry; everyone said he had worms and hollow legs because he ate so much. He remembered the way his father had eked out his paltry wage so Wilfred might have more food. When money was very short, his da made kettle broth with hot water poured over broken bread, and when there was no work as a gravedigger, he would spend his days walking the hills and valleys around Narberth foraging for food with an instinctive sharpness born of hunger and the imperative to feed his child. He would find mushrooms and wild garlic, occasionally potatoes, and in the late summer there were hazelnuts, walnuts, many blackberries and sometimes strawberries. Then in their small yard his da grew vegetables, willing himself to be green-fingered while tending the peas, turnups, cauliflowers and the parsnips, and feeling dismayed if there were caterpillars on the cabages.

Hunger made Wilfred eat every morsel in his bowl, even the tasteless kettle broth, scraping the enamel until there was nothing left. Then his da would turn from the table and stand at the sink tidying so Wilfred could lick his bowl clean while his da pretended not to see, because he knew that his son was hungry and needed all the food he could get. And they shared their meals with great generosity because they had both lost so deeply and dearly when Wilfred’s mam had died that neither of them could bear the thought of life without the other – and so their consideration for each other overrode their own hunger.

‘No, Da, I’m not hungry – you have the last slice of bread,’ Wilfred would insist when he got older. ‘I found an apple on the way home.’ From necessity, he had become an adept scrumper of the many pears and apples in Narberth’s orchards.

‘You eat it, boy,’ his da would urge. ‘I’ve had more than enough, an ample sufficiency.’ Both of them knew the other was fibbing.

But there were many nights when Wilfred, despite his da’s very best efforts, went to bed hungry, his stomach taut over his hipbones, and he would lie, listening to his da snoring and harrumphing in the next room, unable to think of anything but Mrs Annie Evans’s magnificent Conduit Stores with its breathtaking array of sweet jars crammed with pastel-coloured sugar almonds, sticky liquorice allsorts and toffee, precious as gold. Then there was the counter lined with fresh, hot, wondrous loaves. In those famished bedtimes of his childhood, Wilfred imagined eating huge mouthfuls of bread spread munificently with butter and piled high with jam before falling asleep while saying his prayers: ‘Our Father, Who Art in Heaven, eating jam.’



Wilfred settled into the driving seat of the hearse and adjusted the mirror. He found a barley sugar in his trouser pocket, brushed the lint off it then popped the sweet in his mouth. He still felt guilty about Grace, very worried that he had hurt and humiliated her in the High Street, but he must try and put thoughts of Grace out of his mind and focus on the matter at hand today: young chap from Templeton. Flu.

At Templeton Church the pallbearers were waiting, bowler hats held tightly, looking out desolately to the empty road and the green valley beyond, waiting for Wilfred to arrive.

‘Good afternoon, Mr Enoch Davies. And Mr James Davies and Mr David Davies,’ said Wilfred, nodding at the father and brothers of the deceased. ‘My sincerest condolences to you all.’ He had already offered his condolences to the next of kin but one could never say enough comforting words to the anguished souls of the bereaved. The men collected sombrely and silently around the sleek hearse to help slide the casket out.

‘At the count of three: one, two, three.’ Wilfred took his usual position of back right and checked the pallbearers were ready to process. Today the chief pallbearer was the deceased’s father. Sons, sons-in-law, sometimes brothers and the occasional husband carried the casket, but fathers were unusual now the Great War was over. This father would be weakened by his grief, perhaps struggling to stand upright under the burden of intolerable feelings. Wilfred would have to ensure the other pallbearer at the front was strong and could carry the weight on his shoulders alone should the father falter, as fathers were wont to do on these occasions.

‘Right we are then, in we go,’ he instructed. At the tabernacle the four men stopped, adjusted their shoulders under the wooden box to calibrate the weight of it between them and began walking the long path through the graveyard into the sturdy church, past the congregation to the waiting vicar. The intensity of the mourners’ grief increased the nearer to the altar they were sitting. In a funeral, unlike the theatre, no one wanted to be entitled to a front seat.

The Revd Waldo Williams preached the peroration on the verse Blessed are the pure of heart for they shall see God. Wilfred sat quietly in an empty pew behind a professional mourner and listened while the Reverend spoke earnestly about the brief life of the deceased.

‘And Mr Davies, who was known for enjoying a flapjack …’ A muffled squeak emerged from a grieving lady in the next pew who quickly put her hanky to her mouth. Wilfred bowed his head.

‘Mr Davies was a keen horticulturalist of root vegetables and celebrated throughout all of Templeton for his inventive carnival costumes,’ the vicar declared.

Wilfred surreptitiously stretched his long legs, which were getting stiff, and lost himself in his thoughts. I did a good job on that coffin, he thought to himself. As the Revd Waldo Williams continued his – it had to be said – rather lengthy sermon, Wilfred noticed how the vicar spoke. The Reverend had come to Narberth from Birmingham: he spoke differently and it wasn’t only his funny-peculiar accent. His family, Wilfred had heard, owned a locks-and hinges factory, and as a boy he’d been sent away to a school called Rugby where the game of rugby football was created, then on to the University of Oxford. Wilfred knew that because after the Reverend’s name on the Tabernacle Chapel board it was painted: Minister: The Reverend Waldo C. Williams, MA (Oxon.). MA meant Master of the Arts, which is what you were, Wilfred knew, if you had been to Oxford University. (Oxon.) had nothing to do with dairy farming.

Wilfred stood again for the New Testament reading, barely listening to the familiar words of the Gospel of St Mark nor to the second hymn, ‘Nearer My God to Thee’. He wanted to improve himself, to keep on learning. Mr Ogmore Auden often said, ‘As long as you’re reading, you’re learning.’ Indeed, his father spent many evenings before going to the graveyard bent over the pictures of the celestial spheres in The Constellations of the Stars for the Enthusiastic Amateur. It was the only book in the house – apart from the family Bible, of course. Wilfred liked the names in his father’s book: Cassiopeia, Virgo, Venus, Ursa Minor, Ursa Major – they sounded like lovely ladies rather than burning balls of gas in the heavens.

The thought of ladies reminded him of Grace. He had not been very clever towards Grace. It was not his finest hour. Quite undignified, really, if he thought about it. And hurtful. Caused him no end of worry. Perhaps if he had a bit more learning and a bit less stupidity – if he knew more things – then that could only be a help.

‘Mr James L. Davies has ascended on angelic wings of burnished gold,’ preached the Reverend, ‘with seraphim and cherubim, into the immutably effulgent dominion of Heaven!’

They were big words, Wilfred thought, but a clever man such as the Reverend Waldo Williams, MA (Oxon.) used a great many difficult words – and furthermore knew what they meant. What was the word the Reverend had used in a sermon a while back? Necro-something. Wilfred had never heard of that word before. But a man of the world, a man of commerce, should know what long words meant, be able to use them in his sentences and in conversations, particularly with his elders and betters. Wilfred was proud of what he had achieved: coffin-making was a craft and there would always be a call for craftsmen. He did an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay and there was honour in that, but he felt that if he wanted to be a man about town, a man about Narberth and a purveyor of superior funerals, then there was a call for him to have some learning.

Wilfred knew the words for undertaking, the unusual words: pall, formaldehyde, catafalque, moment of committal and veronica, he even knew columbarium, but he wanted a better vocabulary. Vocabulary – that was a big word. There were big words in the dictionary. The answer, Wilfred realized, with the suddenness of inspiration, was to buy a dictionary and read it.



First thing the next morning, Wilfred caught the train to St Clears and from there the number 29 bus to Laugharne and, in the damp cellar of Laugharne Books under the lopsided staircase amid a mountain of books, found, with no help at all from Mr Rudyard Sackville – miserable bugger – an old dictionary with red cloth covers and no dust jacket. Wilfred read the gilt lettering on the front cover: The Concise English Dictionary: Literary, Scientific and Technical with Pronouncing List of Proper Names: Foreign Words & Phrases: Key to Names in Mythology & Fiction and Other Valuable Appendices. Also a Supplement of Words of Recent Occurrence. By Dr Charles Annund. And he felt confident that, with such a title, the dictionary would surely include all the words he should ever need and all the words that could answer all the questions in the world. It might even help him be somewhat kinder and wiser with ladies. There were green mould spots all over the endpapers, it smelled as mildewy as Laugharne Books itself and the silk ribbon was broken, but no matter. Nor was it a new dictionary, but words were words. They never changed, did they? thought Wilfred.

‘I’ll take this dictionary, please,’ he said to the very fat Mr Rudyard Sackville who was wearing a food-stained waist-jacket and slumbered behind a desk tottering with books. ‘I came from Narberth specially to get it.’

‘Three shillings,’ Mr Rudyard Sackville stated, and sighed hopelessly.

Wilfred counted out his shillings one by one, then said, ‘Thank you.’

The bookseller nodded regretfully and slumped back in his chair with a deep fatigue.

‘It’s useful to have a dictionary,’ enjoined Wilfred.

‘Who’s to say?’ Mr Rudyard Sackville replied, then asked, sighing, ‘What’s it for?’

‘Well, actually, to tell the truth, I thought I might read it.’

‘What’s it all for?’ the man mumbled.

There are happier buggers in the graveyard, Wilfred thought to himself.

The inscription on the inside cover read Presented to Caradoc Griffiths for Sunday School Attendance, in the Year of the Lord, 1892. PWLLGWAELOD Chapel. Then underneath someone had written, presumably Caradoc Griffiths in a less Christian moment:

Black is the raven and black is the rook

But blackest is the person who stealeth this book.

Steal not this book for fear of life

For the owner carries a carving knife.

Wilfred – once he’d bought it, of course – went straight home and immediately put a bold line straight though Caradoc and Griffiths and wrote his own name in obsidian ink in his best cursive hand, Wilfred Price, then added, UNDERTAKER so that the red dictionary was officially his. He could start reading it from the beginning at the letter A … well, he would think how he would do it, but for now he only knew that he would start.



Wilfred was full of purpose; he had some business he needed to attend to. The sun was on his broad neck and he was cycling powerfully. He could have pushed the bike up the hill instead of pedalling because the road was very steep – all the hills near the sea in Pembrokeshire were steep and it was many miles. But, well, Wilfred told himself, if Flora is wearing a dress, a flimsy summer dress that goes in at the waist and out at the … and her arms are bare and her wild brown hair loose, then it would be all to the best if he was physically exhausted. Even if Flora’s clothes and dark hair were very becoming, he resolved that he would: Not. Be. Overcome. There were many very attractive ladies in Narberth – some real tomatoes! – but he couldn’t be proposing to them all. He had learned that now, and felt another pang of remorse towards Grace. He dearly hoped she was well and no longer hurt.

Wilfred cycled arduously upwards, past clusters of bluebells by the hedgerow, a profusion of them in a clear, strong lilac colour. ‘Come on, Wilfred, come on!’ he said to himself. Heck, he thought, it’d be nice to live in Norfolk: it was as flat as a pancake apparently. That would be marvellous for any cyclist. Mind, if he lived in Norfolk and didn’t wear himself ragged cycling strenuously up almighty hills he might be proposing willy-nilly to all the peachy girls, and that would never do. He didn’t want to hurt anyone else. No, hills were God’s gift to the unmarried man. And he must be careful not to suffer from aboulia again, he thought, using a word he had acquired from his dictionary. Aboulia had already caused him – and Grace – enough anguish.

He hunched his shoulders and leaned forward on the handlebars. Wilfred wanted a wife – that much he knew. It was a big decision for any man to make, no doubt about it, especially one such as himself who had already been none too clever in these difficult matters of matrimony. And he also knew that from now on, he would approach these things differently, more considerately for starters. He knew he wanted a good woman but beyond that Wilfred wasn’t at all sure what made a good wife. He would need to have what his apprentice-master Mr Ogmore Auden had once called ‘lustful thoughts’ about his betrothed – Wilfred was confident that he wouldn’t find that difficult.

He stopped to wipe his brow with his handkerchief. He knew he couldn’t feel towards his prospective wife as he had towards Elizabeth Thomas, who was a very pleasant person, no one could doubt it. But with her buck teeth and unfortunate frizz of hair, Elizabeth Thomas from Plain Dealings Road had been a relief to Wilfred when he was an apprentice because she was one of the very few young women in Narberth he didn’t have lustful thoughts about. That was why they’d been friends; he could actually have a conversation with Miss Elizabeth Thomas without being distracted.

Wilfred fell into a rhythm with the pedalling and was making slow and steady progress up the incline. What did a man look for in a wife, he wondered. Was it cooking? Cleaning? Cleaning would be handy: neither he nor his da were very particular around the house and it could get a bit much sometimes. Perhaps a lady who liked wallpaper and who would be good as a shop assistant in a paint and wallpaper shop.

He arrived at the crest of the hill, dismounted from his bike and quenched his thirst with some water from his glass bottle while he surveyed the cove. The water was placid, the clouds fluffy. It was beautiful here, high up and close to the heavens. Wilfred didn’t know what marriage involved. Because his father was widowed, Wilfred had had no insight into the day-to-day goings-on of marriage, hadn’t grown up enveloped in one. He imagined the worst ones were like Punch and Judy’s marriage. He’d seen the puppet show once on the annual Bethesda Chapel Sunday School outing to Saundersfoot – the man hit the woman, the woman nagged the man, and they lived with an alligator. That was no good at all, thought Wilfred, getting back on his bicycle and freewheeling down the last stretch of the road to White Hook.

He coursed down the lane, weaving from side to side. It definitely wouldn’t do to marry someone unkind. And every man wanted to marry a woman who was a lady, although it had occurred to him that he didn’t want his wife to be a lady all the time. Wilfred could imagine occasions, more private occasions, when he would enjoy it if his wife was a little less decorous.

It was a sultry day and the leaves on the trees along the lane created a dappled shade. Wilfred took his hands off the handlebars and leaned back. There was only one corner to cycle round and then he’d be there. Wilfred knew hardly anything about this Miss Flora Edwards. Except that she was not like other women, seemed more ordered within herself, perhaps wilder in her expression. And did she take photographs? How modern. She was mysterious to him. Surely you shouldn’t marry a woman because she was enigmatic? There was that children’s hymn that they’d sung in Scripture lessons, the one about the parable: ‘The WISE man BUILT his HOUSE upon the ROCK’. Mystery wasn’t a rock, it was a foundation of sand, and as that parable explained, if you built your house on the sand, it collapsed.

He reached the end of the lane and rounded the corner. Grace, Wilfred conjectured, was like a daisy, with her blonde, bobbed hair and pale skin. Flora was more … he didn’t know what, only when he thought of her he was reminded of the rich, deep scent of the wine-coloured wallflowers that grew freely through the iron railings near the stream. Where Grace had been obvious, Flora was deeper, and was reeling him in.

He arrived at the gate to White Hook and felt a wave of anxiety in his throat. He was here. He had anticipated this for long days and suddenly he was here. The bicycle wheels crunched on the gravel as he began walking up the drive. Right, he decided, he was going to invite her to the Staunton House Refreshment Rooms in Narberth. It was a popular café, if a bit steamy, and they had an impressive selection of cream cakes which he knew ladies were partial to. But would it be good enough for Flora? He’d taken Grace there once, but Flora was different. Flora was the bee’s knees, the cat’s pyjamas. Though what if she needed a chaperone? What if her mother came along and sat there like a fire extinguisher?

At the top of the drive he bent to pull off his trouser clips then leaned his bicycle against the kitchen wall with a clatter. Right. He would deliver the invoice for the funeral to Mrs Melbourne Edwards – he had it ready in an envelope in his inside pocket – and once financial matters were settled he would ask Flora if she would care to join him for a pot of tea, at a later date, at her convenience, at the Staunton House Refreshment Rooms in Narberth. Right. Yes, he would do that.



‘The service was to your satisfaction, mam?’

‘Yes, thank you, Mr Price. And you’ll be wanting to settle the bill for services rendered.’

‘Ah …’ This was always an awkward moment in the undertaking business. Customers had recently buried a loved family member – something they hadn’t wanted to do anyway – and now Wilfred was asking them to pay for it. It added insult to injury. What had Mr Ogmore Auden said? ‘Be delicate in your business dealings but make sure the buggers pay!’ That could be easier said than done in some cases, Wilfred thought.

‘I’ll write a banker’s cheque for the full amount.’ Mrs Melbourne Edwards searched for a pen in the drawer of the Welsh dresser but was unable to find one. Wilfred took a risk.

‘May I offer you mine, Mrs Edwards?’ he said, proffering his fountain pen from his inside pocket. Sometimes people wouldn’t borrow an ink pen in case they bent the gold nib with their specific way of holding the pen and spoiled it for the owner, but Mrs Melbourne Edwards accepted his offer.

‘Thank you very much, Mr Price. That’s most kind of you. Things get mislaid in these drawers for weeks on end. I expect your mam is more organized than I am.’ Wilfred smiled politely.

Flora was standing barefooted by the gas stove, her chestnut hair catching the light. Wilfred was agonizingly aware of her, barely able to concentrate with her presence so close.

Mrs Melbourne Edwards flapped the banker’s cheque in the air to dry the ink then handed the payment to Wilfred. Wilfred took the cheque in both hands, formally thanked Mrs Edwards and then summoned his courage.

‘I was wondering’, Wilfred began slowly, ‘if your daughter … Flora …’ this was more awkward than he’d envisioned … ‘would like to have a cup of tea or coffee.’ Why did he say coffee? It was too strong! It sounded completely wrong. He hadn’t meant to say coffee; he’d even practised saying, ‘Tea and cake.’

‘A cup of tea!’ exclaimed Flora’s mother. ‘Tea! At this time? And her father not yet in his grave three weeks. Mr Price, surely …’ Mrs Melbourne Edwards looked bewildered.

‘Yes, forgive me,’ said Wilfred far too hastily. ‘I don’t know what came over me.’ He assumed his funeral face. ‘I hoped a modest change of scenery and an anteprandial refreshment might provide somewhat of a relief to your daughter during these exceedingly sad times.’ Wilfred was lying: his face turned redder.

‘Well, I shall say Auf Wiedersehen to you both,’ he said, remembering the dictionary definition he had read that morning.

As Wilfred slipped his pen back into his jacket pocket he glanced surreptitiously at Flora. He saw her dignified, straight neck, her head bent down, her abundant mass of brown hair, saw her move the toes of her right foot back and forth elegantly across the slate floor, like a ballerina practising. Her mother had said no but was Flora saying no? Could a mother speak for a daughter? Could Mrs Melbourne Edwards speak for Flora? These were modern times. Flora swayed slightly as she moved her pointed toes gently from side to side, and in her swaying Wilfred read her yes.