‘Less than a year married, and runs home to mother so soon?’ Dorothy asked, with a gruesome twinkle. ‘She hasn’t run home.’ Laurie tried to stay polite. ‘She wants to see them, and this is the cheap fare season, and later she’ll be too far on with the baby.’ ‘In my day,’ Dorothy said, ‘wives stayed close to their husbands when they were carrying.’ ‘In your day,’ Laurie said rudely, ‘women wouldn’t let their husbands sleep with them when they were pregnant, so they had to stick around to see no one else moved in.’ Dorothy bridled, but Sybil let out a guffaw. It was the sort of remark she could still enjoy, but with which people seldom favoured her, as if her memory had gone about that too. While Jess was away, Laurie only came once or twice to see his grandmother. He did not stay long, and seemed nervous and irritable. They were working him too hard, driving him like a nervous horse. Sybil had seen him like this before when he was at college, plunging exhausted into combat with his final exams.
