They are watching me, thought Rupert Stonebird, as he saw the two women walking rather too slowly down the road. But no doubt I am watching them too, he decided, for as an anthropologist he knew that men and women may observe each other as warily as wild animals hidden in long grass.

The situation had nothing particularly unusual about it – an unmarried man visiting the house he had just bought and wondering where he should put his furniture, and two women – sisters, perhaps – betraying a very natural interest in the man or the house or both. One day, he thought, we shall probably know each other, and for that reason he turned away from the window, not feeling quite equal to meeting the unashamed curiosity of their glances as they came nearer. But now the taller one, who looked older, was gazing rather ostentatiously away. The smaller one seemed to find it necessary to raise her voice, so that Rupert heard a sentence of their conversation before they passed out of earshot.

‘The vicar’s wife and her sister – isn’t that just what we look like,’ said Penelope Grandison, ‘and laden with parcels too. Not the kind of people who have everything sent.’

‘We’ve been shopping,’ said Sophia Ainger, ‘so of course we’re laden.’ She spoke rather absently for she was remembering a vase of stiff-looking artificial flowers of an unknown species, seen fleetingly in a funeral director’s window, which now overlaid her memory of the bright Kensington shops and brought her back to the reality of her life in North London. The afternoon’s shopping had been arranged to console her sister Penelope, who at twenty-five was still young enough to suffer disappointments in love as commonly as colds or headaches. On this occasion it was to be hoped that humiliation and hurt pride had been assuaged by a new pair of shoes and a many-stranded jet necklace – like early travellers taking presents to the natives, Sophia felt.

‘Men seem to prefer young girls of eighteen,’ said Penelope gloomily, ‘and then where are you.’

‘But there have always been girls of eighteen, even in my day,’ Sophia protested.

‘Well you just married the curate, so it was all right. One wouldn’t expect a clergyman to be interested in young girls of eighteen.’

‘I don’t see why not – after all I was only just twenty-one when I married Mark.’

‘How old would you say that man standing in the window of that house was?’ asked Penelope tentatively.

‘Oh, in his thirties probably. I didn’t see him very clearly,’ Sophia added. Yet she had retained an impression of somebody so ordinary-looking that his very lack of distinction was in itself reassuring. She hoped that if he was a churchgoer – which was unlikely these days – he would not recognise her as the vicar’s wife. He had probably not even noticed her, a tall, rather too thin woman of thirty odd, with dark auburn hair. Penelope, with her brighter red hair and rather flamboyant appearance, was much more distinctive.

‘I suppose Mark will call on him as he’s living in the parish?’ Penelope suggested hopefully.

‘He will do what he ought to do – you can depend on that.’

‘It’s a comfort when people do what they ought to do. Not like him,’ said Penelope bitterly.

‘Never mind, Penny. He wasn’t good enough for you, anyway,’ said Sophia.

‘But men and women never do match each other in that kind of way – that’s life.’

‘No, women are usually too good for men, but Mark is much too good for me,’ said Sophia. ‘Do you know, he told me not to worry about supper tonight but to enjoy my afternoon out. He said he’d get something.’

Penelope did not answer. Her brother-in-law, with his remote good looks, never seemed quite real to her. She found it difficult to imagine him getting something for supper.

‘FRYING TONIGHT. ROCK SALMON – SKATE – PLAICE.’ Mark Ainger read from the roughly chalked-up notice in the steamy window. Which would Sophia prefer? he asked himself. And which would tempt Faustina’s delicate appetite? Rock salmon – that had a noble sound about it, though he believed it was actually inferior to real salmon. Skate – he imagined that was one of those flat bony fish, with the teeth showing in a sardonic grin. Only plaice was familar to him, so he supposed it had better be that. Plaice, then, and two helpings – better make it three if Faustina was to be included – perhaps ‘portions’ was the word – and some chips. He must get this right, not make a fool of himself by stumbling over the words, not using the correct terminology or not knowing which fish he wanted.

Turning down the collar of his raincoat and arranging it to expose his clerical collar – for he was not ashamed of his calling – Mark entered the shop.

‘Three portions of plaice and some chips, please,’ he said firmly in his pleasant baritone voice.

‘Mind, Father, it’s hot – have you got something to put it in?’

Mark lifted up his zip-fastened bag and the fragrant, greasy, newspaper-wrapped bundle was placed carefully inside it. Good-nights were exchanged and he left the shop with a feeling of satisfaction, as if a rather difficult task had been successfully accomplished.

This was the very fringe of his parish, that part that would never become residentially ‘desirable’ because it was too near the railway, and many of the big gaunt houses had been taken over by families of West Indians. Mark had been visiting, trying to establish some kind of contact with his exotic parishioners and hoping to discover likely boys and men to sing in the choir and serve at the altar. He had received several enthusiastic offers, though he wondered how many of them would really turn up in church. As he walked away from the house, Mark had remembered that it was along this street, with its brightly – almost garishly – painted houses that Sophia had once seen a cluster of what she took to be exotic tropical fruits in one of the windows, only to realise that they were tomatoes put there to ripen. ‘ Love apples,’ she had said to Mark, and the words ‘love apple’ had somehow given a name to the district, strange and different as it was from the rest of the parish which lay over the other side of the main road, far from the railway line.

Here the houses were less colourful, drably respectable but hardly elegant. On the extreme eastern boundary of the parish, however, where the church and vicarage were rather oddly placed, a number of small terrace houses had been bought up by speculative builders, gutted, modernised, and sold at high prices to people who wanted small houses that were almost in town but could not afford the more fashionable districts of Islington, St John’s Wood or Hampstead. It was in one of these that Sophia and Penelope had seen the stranger.

Afterwards he went by way of St Basil’s Terrace, looking as Sophia had done earlier at the newly done up houses with their prettily painted front doors and rather self-conscious window-boxes and bay trees in tubs, when a woman’s voice called out behind him, ‘Good evening vicar – been getting fish for pussy?’

When he turned round, rather startled, the voice went on, ‘Oh, I know what you’ve got in the bag – you can’t hide anything from me!’

‘No, Sister Dew, I don’t suppose I can,’ said Mark in a resigned tone. All the same he did not feel inclined to reveal that the fish was not only for Faustina – who was never called ‘pussy’ – but also for his and his wife’s supper.

‘How you do love pussy,’ Sister Dew went on. ‘Only the other day I was at the vicarage, seeing Mrs Ainger about my stall at the bazaar – I’m doing the fancy work this year, you know – and there was pussy, bold as brass, if you please, walking into the lounge as if she owned it.’

But she does, Mark thought, though he said nothing.

‘“Oh, Mrs Ainger”, I said, “ you wouldn’t want pussy going in your lounge, would you.”’ Sister Dew smiled up at Mark, for she was a little dumpy woman. Her prominent blue eyes, seeming to bulge with curiosity, met Mark’s eyes, which were also blue, but with that remote expression sometimes found in the eyes of sailors or explorers. Although invariably kind and courteous he had the air of seeming not to be particularly interested in human beings – a somewhat doubtful quality in a parish priest, though it had its advantages.

‘You’ll find pussy going on the beds next,’ Sister Dew went on. ‘On the beds and in the lounge – you couldn’t have that.’

Mark’s smile did not reveal that Faustina naturally went on the beds as well as in the lounge. He was wondering if, strictly speaking, a vicarage could be said to have a lounge – he would have thought not. Sister Dew was a tedious little woman but she must be listened to because of all his parishioners she was the one most likely to take offence. She was a retired hospital nurse and Mark had often wondered why her noble profession, so intimately connected with the great events of life, should have made her so petty-minded. Perhaps it was their very greatness that made her so – one couldn’t be noble all the time.

‘How pretty those houses are,’ said Mark, feeling that he ought to stay and talk to her a little longer. He was hungry and conscious of the delicious greasy bundle in his bag, but he believed fish and chips were usually heated up in the oven anyway, so they wouldn’t spoil.

‘Yes, and nice people coming to live in them.’ She lowered her voice. ‘I’ve heard this one we’re standing by has been bought by a television producer. Associated Rediffusion,’ she added reverently.

Mark puzzled over the words, but they meant nothing to him.

‘And there’s Miss Broome opposite, with the mauve front door – she’s sweet, I think. Just the kind of person we want at St Basil’s.’

Mark’s face brightened for he remembered who Miss Broome was – a nice-looking youngish woman who had been to church the last two or three Sundays.

‘Her mother was a canon’s widow,’ said Sister Dew, in her reverent Associated Rediffusion voice.

‘So her father must have been a canon,’ said Mark, though he felt that for some reason it was the canon’s widow who cut more ice here. Since Miss Broome’s parents were both dead, it could never be known how it had been in life.

‘She’s a librarian or something like that,’ Sister Dew went on. ‘And that lovely fur coat! Chinchilla, I would have said, but I suppose it couldn’t be. Grey squirrel, more likely, though one doesn’t see that much nowadays. Well, I mustn’t keep you, vicar, or pussy will have something to say, won’t she.’

Sister Dew scuttled off to her own house, which was at the as yet unfashionable end of the terrace, and Mark hurried along the short distance to the vicarage. Beyond it lay the Victorian Gothic church and some large houses of the same period, now mostly turned into flats.

Sophia was in the kitchen, laying the table for supper.

‘What is chinchilla?’ Mark asked, as he handed over the fish and chips.

‘Why, a kind of fur, pale grey and very expensive – worn mostly by wealthy Edwardian ladies with a bunch of Parma violets and perhaps a toque.’

‘Ah yes, the kind of hat your mother used to wear.’

‘Why do you want to know about chinchilla? I can’t believe you’ve come across any in Love Apple Road this afternoon.’

‘It’s the kind of fur Sister Dew thought Miss Broome’s coat might be – but apparently it would be too expensive even for a canon’s daughter.’

‘Oh yes – but how well it would suit Ianthe Broome – she’s just the type for chinchilla.’

‘And so are you, darling,’ said Mark. ‘And all I bring you is fish and chips.’

Sophia had, in a sense, married beneath her, for although Mark came of a good clerical family he was without private means. Sophia’s mother spoke in hushed tones of her son-in-law’s parish – much too near the Harrow Road and North Kensington to be the kind of district one liked to think of one’s daughter living in, though of course a vicarage was different. The clergy had to go to these rather dreadful places, but it was a pity Mark couldn’t have got something ‘better’, like a Knightsbridge or South Kensington church, or even a good country living.

‘I love fish and chips,’ said Sophia warmly, ‘and I think they’re ready now.’

No sooner had the dish been taken from the oven than a tortoiseshell cat entered the room, and leapt, via Mark’s knee, on to the table.

‘You wouldn’t want pussy on the table, as Sister Dew might say,’ said Mark, making a feeble attempt to remove her.

‘No, Faustina,’ said Sophie more sternly. ‘We do not leap on to the table for our food. We take it from our dish in the proper place.’

‘But there is nothing in the dish,’ Mark pointed out.

‘No, but we must be patient,’ said Sophia, helping the cat first. ‘Whatever would Daisy and Edwin Pettigrew say if they could see such behaviour!’

The Pettigrews, brother and sister, lived next door to the vicarage. Edwin was a veterinary surgeon and Daisy looked after the animals who were sometimes boarded with them.

‘Well, one naturally expects a cattery to be more austere,’ said Mark. ‘It must be like animals leading a monastic life.’

When they had washed up they went into the sitting room – neither ‘lounge’ nor ‘drawing room’ seemed right to describe it – and listened to a concert on the wireless, for they had no television set and no grateful parishioners had yet clubbed together to provide one. Mark thought out his letter for the October number of the parish magazine, while Sophia sorted out a basket of quinces which her mother had sent up from the country.

‘I shall make jelly,’ she said, ‘and keep some on a dish here – they smell so delicious.’ She sighed, not wanting to add that they reminded her of her childhood home in case Mark should be hurt. In these less gracious surroundings she had tried to recapture the atmosphere of her mother’s house with bowls of quinces, the fragrance of well polished furniture, and the special Earl Grey tea, but she often realised how different it really was. The vicarage had been built to match the church and the style of the rooms had not yet, and perhaps never would, become fashionable again.

‘How was Penelope?’ Mark asked.

‘Oh, much as usual. I helped her to choose a dress. And she was going for an interview for a new job tomorrow.’ Sophia did not mention the unsuccessful love affair. Mark could not really enter into such things.

‘I suppose her autumn social life will be starting,’ he said absently, ‘and I suppose the note of my October magazine letter ought to be something about the autumn and winter social activities,’ he went on, taking up his pen again. ‘And perhaps a welcome to the strangers in our midst?’

‘Yes, that would be most appropriate,’ said Sophia. She suspected that Mark was thinking of the West Indians who had come to live in the parish and of course that was very right. But she was thinking more of Ianthe Broome and the man she and Penelope had seen that afternoon, and wondering what they would be like. There was always that slight excitement and uncertainty about living in a London parish – one never knew who might turn up in church on Sunday.