Frieda Mayor went to draw the curtain. Across the road [in Hampstead]someone pulled a blind down. `Arnie van Blijven’s in,’ said Mrs Mayor. She looked down at the road, but her window was too high to allow her to see the lighted windows, mostly on the ground floor, by which she could have checked on the presence of those other women who had been washed up on this foreign shore.
‘Trix is back. She came back yesterday,’ said Trudy.
‘They didn’t keep her in?’
‘With beds so short?’
‘So ... Does Arnie know Trix is back? She and Trix are such friends ...' or at least, come from the same town, she thought. ‘And Trix’s sister in Arnhem, does she know?’
‘Trix’s daughter said not to phone her. It would only worry her, she said. She might want to come and see her.’
The old women nodded to each other. Trix’s daughter would not want her aunt to look after as well as her mother. They expected no more of her, nor of any of those dutiful and diligent children in whose houses they had come so helplessly to rest.
The road, which only twenty or thirty years earlier — less even than that, only a dozen years ago — had echoed with children’s voices, was now filled with old women, widows most of them, many of them from Europe. It was nice for her mother, an occasional daughter might say, that Mary’s mother was Hungarian too ... a coffee party might be arranged. But mainly the householders, sunk in their own problems, scarcely realised the secondary population of the road, tucked away in their attics and spare rooms, and occasionally, when stair climbing became a problem, given a grudgingly adapted dining-room. They ignored them, as one assumes the Romans ignored the parallel population of slaves.

But to think of it, all these churches ... her thoughts flowed more freely as she neared home. ‘I had no idea,’ she admitted to herself, accusing herself of blindness because self-accusation came easily these days, ‘no idea at all ... all these private cellular lives must be going on all over London. I can’t imagine Father Long even noticing it.’ Structures of theological thought were producing strange landscapes throughout England, she supposed. And poor Father Long was so easily terrified by the new and the strange. And then Giles ... She suddenly had an extraordinarily funny picture of Giles talking to the pastor about the prophecies of Ezekiel over his elegant and lethal wine cup.
The map of London disintegrated, swirled round in a dizzying kaleidoscopic pattern, fell in fragments on the floor of her mind.
She turned into her own road. ‘Who are the Children of Sinai?’ she wondered, ‘Who are the Apostolic Brethren? Who are the Congregation of the Pillar of Fire?’ All these groups believing and acting according to their own faiths and moralities, she thought to herself, half liberated by the idea, half confused.
She got out of the car intoxicated for a moment by the excitement of her fading vision of a London transformed by strange and innocent faiths. She was sure they were innocent.