The morning was spent doing the filing, which had rather got left on one side. Mrs Halloran fought a losing battle over the piles of material she insisted on keeping around her like an entrenchment, and then, when I took it away from her, reached into her bag and produced a bottle of ginger wine and a packet of chocolate biscuits. Becoming rather animated, she seized our Mickey Mouse mugs, splashed the wine into them, and handed them round. Olivia, to do her credit, drank with an expression of calm enjoyment; one of her unexpected accomplishments is that she can eat and drink anything. I was not so lucky, but I made a great show of sipping and exclaiming with pleasure. I must have rather overdone it, because I found Mrs Halloran’s eye fixed on me with an expression of extreme scepticism. After that I could hardly complain that she had left a small mess of crumbs all over a rather revolting engraving of a scene from Molière’s Malade Imaginaire, which showed a couple of doctors in shovel hats wielding a syringe the size of a Bofors gun.
