And she told me that during the hours of wakefulness, in the night, in the gray dawn, she would time travel, reenter the past in reverie, that there was a trick to it, like threading a needle with your eyes closed. Done right, she could live it again, certain moments, certain days, not as herself, but as a witness, a will-o’-the-wisp, shadowing younger Mrs. Easts, reliving days fifty, sixty years old:

“I was out at the castle. I used to go there to watch them come home, the bombers, to count them in like hens into the coop. Listening out for their engines. Scanning the skies. I used to think if I could be there to count, I could keep them safe, stop the fox from getting them. I was wearing the lilac cardigan and my brown shoes. The bomber made a funny noise as it came in, the engine stuttering. On the airfield, the men came running. Tiny, they were. The noise stopped, the engine noise, and they were coming down. I felt my heart stop. It stopped in my chest. All the birds lifted from the fields below. They came up and the plane came down over my head, so close I could see the bullet holes.”

We were standing at her back window, watching the day leaving. Late September sunset: a rollout of radiant pink, the sun offering a rose-gold wreath to the earth; the light touched the mist rising from the harvested fields, and the vapor became corporeal, the body of a god as a shower of golden light. Her head lay on my shoulder. She made a gesture with her hand, the one that would have also belonged to one of her parents and charmed those who loved her, a sort of circling indication meant to firm up meaning, to locate it in the ether, when she felt her words were not enough.

“Andy, I think sometimes of all the jobs people don’t have anymore: cartwright, and plowman and lamplighter, coalman, quarryman. It’s like even the words are becoming ghosts, are vanishing into the mist. It’s like souls dying.”

The last times I saw her, in the hospital in Oxford—my third year in London, fourth?—she took my hand and told me that she was sorry she hadn’t done more. “I should have stuck a carving knife in him, Andy my love. That Joe. It’s the only thing I regret.”

“You still haven’t got a nine at Countdown, Mrs. East.”

“I did so.”

“‘Seraphims’ isn’t a word, my darling.” And I kissed her bony hands, and the creases on her cheeks, and when I fell asleep in the chair I thought I heard her say something, one last thing, but my eyelids were too heavy and I missed it, I missed the last thing Mrs. East ever told me.

But on the subject of the diamonds, Mrs. East should have kept her mouth shut.