Storyboard by John Bowen

from the kitchen taps, and there was electric light and a telephone; the floors of all the upstairs rooms were rippled like gentle wooden waves, but the old outdoor privy was now only a toolshed, and there was a warmed towel-rail in the bathroom and central heating in inconspicuous pipes along the walls. Simon’s firm had made him an interest-free loan to convert the cottage. He worked in the Personnel Management Division of a large industrial firm near Oxford. The amount of the loan was deducted from his monthly salary in small instalments , and would be paid off altogether by the time he was forty-five years old. If Simon should ever wish to leave the firm, he would have to pay back the balance of the money all at once, but he did not think he would wish to leave. He was happy to stay with such a progressive firm, which treated all its staff on the management side in the same generous paternalistic way.
    Deborah and Sophia had been friends for years, ever since they had shared the same room in their first year at Durham University, where Deborah read for a degree in Social Science and Sophia read English. They had cycled together down Durham’s cobbled hills; they had drunk coffee together at “The Copper Kettle” between lectures; they had given parties together, with Dutch cheese and French bread, but Spanish burgundy; they had joined the Labour Club together, and left it together . They had visited each other’s homes during vacations , and had worked together one summer as waitresses , and one Christmas sorting letters at the Post Office. They had kept in touch. When Sophia’s mother was killed one slippery January afternoon by an impatient motorist while she was taking her indomitable usual walk with the dog after lunch, it was Deborah who came to cook and clean the suddenly empty house in Totnes, in which Sophia now felt herself to be simply a stranger, but in which Deborah moved as comfortingly and confidently as a District Visitor. It was Deborah who coped, and it was Simon who negotiated the sale of the house, snipping off cleanly for Sophia the few trailing roots which still remained in the home and the county in which she had been reared. How lucky that Simon and Sophia got on so well! Marriage sometimes breaks up a close friendship between women, but, as Deborah always said, simply enlarged theirs.
    Nevertheless there are subjects which even the closest friends—particularly the closest friends—do not discuss. Sophia’s spinsterhood was one of these. She was, as Deborah said to Simon, only just past twenty-eight, which goodness knows is young enough, but which is yet disturbingly close to thirty, and thirty is the age when desperation sets in. It was all very well to go on about being modern, and about the equality of opportunity between the sexes, and about making a career, Deborah felt, but one must be sensible, and the fact remained that most people expected a woman to marry, and unmarried women of over a certain age felt this, and were driven to put up defences against the feeling. Even Simon must have noticed (“Oh, yes, I’ve noticed it,” said Simon) a sort of shrinking inside Sophia, as if between her inner and her outer selves there was now a gap, as if Sophia needed not only a mask against the world (“We all need that,” Deborah said), but an insulation between the mask and herself. It wasn’t good for her; it couldn’t be. Her inner self must be under intense pressure. It might some day burst out and crackeverything wide open. Impossible, of course, to discuss it with her—insensitive and impossible! No relationship, no friendship could stand that degree of frankness. Simon said, “You mean she doesn’t talk to you about affairs and things?” and Deborah replied, “Darling, you are a fool sometimes. Of course she talks about affairs. We have long talks about all that; we always have. But don’t you see, we never talk about them in context. ” Simon thought about this for a