Marion waited in the beer-garden for someone to take her order. At fifty nine she was accustomed to being invisible, but still it rankled.

Perspiration trickled from her hairline and beneath her drooping breasts. If she were to go to the bar herself, she suspected she would leave a damp patch on the cloth- covered seat of her chair.

And no doubt someone would take her table. Though not her chair.

Where could Edith be? This was late, even by Edith’s standards. Almost twenty minutes past the hour.

Sighing, she glanced down at her feet, red and swollen in their strappy leather sandals, unsightly veins standing out in bold relief. Was there any part of her, she thought sadly, that withstood examination these days? How different it had once been.

She observed young women chatting at tables nearby, cool in their sleeveless, low-cut dresses, keenly aware that her ravaged chest and sagging upper arms precluded such comfortable attire. Sensing, rather than actually seeing a woman at the next table looking sympathetically at her, she fingered damp tendrils of hair off her neck.

Did Edith ever consider, she wondered, that the implicit message of her perpetual tardiness was that in some way, Marion’s time was less valuable than her own?

Suddenly, picking up her handbag, she hurried out of the garden and went home.

Ten minutes later, Edith arrived, flushed and breathless.

“Was my friend here? Short woman, curly grey hair.”

“No,” came the universal response, “haven’t seen anybody like that.”