Sublime

Full of kindliness and sympathy, St Cyres persuaded June to give up her flat in town and to come with her small boy to live at Manor Thatch. June had acquiesced at first. She was lonely and frightened and in debt. June St Cyres was one of those young women who can never live within their incomes, but she was shrewd enough to know that she could liv

Anne wore an old heather mixture tweed suit—it was a good suit, but old enough to have lost its lines and become baggy. With her chestnut brown hair, russet cheeks and heather mixture tweed she looked almost part of the landscape, an appropriate sturdy figure, strong and competent. When Colonel St Cyres saw her, he said, “Thank God.” He always did

The “poor chap” of whom the Colonel was thinking was his son, Denis, now a prisoner of war in Japanese hands. Whether the Colonel’s epithet was due to Denis’s plight or to the wife he had married was uncertain, but Colonel St Cyres disliked his daughter-in-law as heartily as any well-bred man allowed himself to dislike a woman.

Susan Cornelia Clarke Warren,

‘She was the wife of John Bell, who owned Lowlands until his death in 1889, and we’ve never known anything more about her: it’s as if she’s been cut out of time. We have records of their marriage, but not of her death; we have no portraits of her anywhere, and when the house and contents were sold none of her possessions were listed in the inventor

Murder

It was a risk to mention the Royal Shakespeare Company, and RADA, but the Discreet Mourners woman failed to link Astrid Miller, Audrey Hepburn’s Friend One, with the Astrid Fellowes who had been at the centre of a scandal in the 1970s and had gone mad on stage at the National, midway through a matinee of Macbeth.