Presently on the last afternoon I heard a voice behind me say: ‘May I stay here and watch?’

I turned and found Cordelia.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘if you don’t talk,’ and I worked on, oblivious of her, until the failing sun made me put up my brushes.

‘It must be lovely to be able to do that.’

I had forgotten she was there.

‘It is.’

I could not even now leave my picture, although the sun was down and the room fading to monochrome. I took it from the easel and held it up to the windows, put it back and lightened a shadow. Then, suddenly weary in head and eyes and back and arm, I gave it up for the evening and turned to Cordelia.

She was now fifteen and had grown tall, nearly to her full height, in the last eighteen months. She had not the promise of Julia’s full quattrocento loveliness; there was a touch of Brideshead already in her length of nose and high cheekbone; she was in black, mourning for her mother.

‘I’m tired,’ I said.

‘I bet you are. Is it finished?’

‘Practically. I must go over it again tomorrow.’

‘D’you know it’s long past dinner time? There’s no one here to cook anything now. I only came up today, and didn’t realize how far the decay had gone. You wouldn’t like to take me out to dinner, would you?’

We left by the garden door, into the park, and walked in the twilight to the Ritz Grill.

‘You’ve seen Sebastian? He won’t come home, even now?’

I did not realize till then that she had understood so much. I said so.

‘Well, I love him more than anyone,’ she said. ‘It’s sad about Marchers, isn’t it? Do you know they’re going to build a block of flats, and that Rex wanted to take what he called a “penthouse” at the top. Isn’t it like him? Poor Julia. That was too much for her. He couldn’t understand at all; he thought she would like to keep up with her old home. Things have all come to an end very quickly, haven’t they? Apparently papa has been terribly in debt for a long time. Selling Marchers has put him straight again and saved I don’t know how much a year in rates. But it seems a shame to pull it down. Julia says she’d sooner that than to have someone else live there.’

‘What’s going to happen to you?’

‘What, indeed? There are all kinds of suggestions. Aunt Fanny Rosscommon wants me to live with her. Then Rex and Julia talk of taking over half Brideshead and living there. Papa won’t come back. We thought he might, but no.

‘They’ve closed the chapel at Brideshead, Bridey and the Bishop; mummy’s Requiem was the last mass said there. After she was buried the priest came in – I was there alone. I don’t think he saw me – and took out the altar stone and put it in his bag; then he burned the wads of wool with the holy oil on them and threw the ash outside; he emptied the holy-water stoop and blew out the lamp in the sanctuary, and left the tabernacle open and empty, as though from now on it was always to be Good Friday. I suppose none of this makes any sense to you, Charles, poor agnostic. I stayed there till he was gone, and then, suddenly, there wasn’t any chapel there any more, just an oddly decorated room. I can’t tell you what it felt like. You’ve never been to Tenebrae, I suppose?’