There came the splash of water and the rub of heels as Mrs. Barber stepped into the tub. After that, there was a silence, broken only by the occasional echo plink of drips from the tap. Frances had been picturing her lodgers in purely mercenary terms - as something like two great waddling shillings. But this, she thought, was what it really meant to have paying guests: this odd, unintimate proximity, this rather peeled-back moment, where the only thing between herself and a naked Mrs. Barber was a few feet of kitchen and a thin scullery door. An image jumped into her head: that round flesh, crimsoning in the heat. It is 1922, and London is tense. Ex-servicemen are disillusioned, the out-of-work and the hungry are demanding change. And in South London, in a genteel Camberwell villa, a large silent house now bereft of brothers, husband and even servants, life is about to be transformed.