I said that I would take care, but that I would not go on sleeping in that apartment.

Like an old man, my father shuffled back to the room in which my mother had died a few days earlier, the only room he had to sleep in, and lay down by himself in that big double bed. It was as though he were locking himself inside a shell.

And I went into my old room, to sleep. As I waited for sleep, halfway to dreams, I thought that a part of me had been ripped out of my body. I know that science has appointed the brain as the seat of all our emotion, but the dull ache of loss has never sounded around my head in the small hours of the night. It is in my chest that it speaks, and it is around my lungs and in the coursing of my blood that I feel as though I am being torn apart. In that half-conscious state, it was not my mind that had been yanked so unceremoniously from my body, but my heart; and when I woke up the next morning, it was in my chest that I seemed to be missing some crucial part of myself, and to be no more than a shadow of what and who I had been.

• • •

Sunday saw the last of the condolence callers. That night, when all the people had left, I packed my things to go back to my own apartment and I went into my parents’ room to say goodbye. My father was sitting on the bed, his bed, and looking at my mother’s handbag, which she had left sitting next to her night table, where it had always been. Either Freddy or Janet had come in over the weekend and closed the book that had been open beside her bed, and put away the glasses that had sat on top of it, but the handbag was just where she had left it.

“Look at that,” said my father.

I was going to meet Helen and she was going to come down and help me settle back into my own apartment. I thought I would explode if I didn’t leave soon. The walls were pressing close; I saw that if I stayed with my father, I would become as old and as lonely as he. That prospect enraged me. I picked up the handbag and put it on the bed.

My father put his hand on the bag.

I picked it up and turned it upside down and shook it, so that everything in it fell onto the bed. My mother’s wallet, her silver pillbox, her lace handkerchief, a square powder compact with an amethyst on it, a few blue felt-tipped pens, a couple of photographs, her ring of keys: all these things went tumbling onto the bedspread; and with the others came also, to my astonishment, the diamond pin that had been my grandmother’s.