The strawberry man, young, yellow, lean and deprived, lifted a snarling face to the window where Molly had already inserted herself. Seeing the two women together he said, as he fumbled with his glittering scales, ‘Overhead costs, what do you know about it?’

‘Then come up and have some coffee and tell us,’ said Molly, her face vivid with challenge.

At which he lowered his face and said to the street floor: ‘Some people have to work, if others haven’t.’

‘Oh go on,’ said Molly, ‘don’t be such a sourpuss. Come up and eat some of your strawberries. On me.’

He didn’t know how to take her. He stood, frowning, his young face uncertain under an over-long slope of greasy fairish hair. ‘I’m not that sort, if you are,’ he remarked, at last, offstage, as it were.

‘So much the worse for you,’ said Molly, leaving the window, laughing at Anna in a way which refused to be guilty.

But Anna leaned out, confirmed her view of what had happened by a look at the man’s dogged, resentful shoulders, and said in a low voice: ‘You hurt his feelings.’

‘Oh hell,’ said Molly, shrugging. ‘It’s coming back to England again — everybody so shut up, taking offence, I feel like breaking out and shouting and screaming whenever I set foot on this frozen soil. I feel locked up, the moment I breathe our sacred air.’

‘All the same,’ said Anna, ‘he thinks you were laughing at him.’

Another customer had slopped out of the opposite house; a woman in Sunday comfort, slacks, loose shirt and a yellow scarf around her head. The strawberry man served her, non-committal. Before he lifted the handles to propel the cart onwards, he looked up again at the window, and seeing only Anna, her small sharp chin buried in her forearm, her black eyes fixed on him, smiling, he said with grudging good-humour: ‘Overhead costs, she says …’ and snorted lightly with disgust. He had forgiven them.

He moved off up the street behind the mounds of softly-red, sunglistening fruit, shouting: ‘Morning-fresh strawberries. Picked this morning!’ Then his voice was absorbed into the din of traffic from the big street a couple of hundred yards down.

Anna turned and found Molly setting bowls of the fruit, loaded with cream, on the sill. ‘I’ve decided not to waste any on Richard,’ said Molly, ‘he never enjoys anything anyway. More beer?’

‘With strawberries, wine, obviously,’ said Anna greedily; and moved the spoon about among the fruit, feeling its soft sliding resistance, and the slipperiness of the cream under a gritty crust of sugar. Molly swiftly filled glasses with wine and set them on the white sill. The sunlight crystallized beside each glass on the white paint in quivering lozenges of crimson and yellow light, and the two women sat in the sunlight, sighing with pleasure and stretching their legs in the thin warmth, looking at the colours of the fruit in the bright bowls and at the red wine.