She crawled to the door to let James in, a grotesque figure in red corduroy trousers and green jumper, her witch’s face framed in a woolly fuzz of grey hair, and behind her, picking his way delicately, Palmerston with tail erect.

‘You can tell that girl she can come up here tonight if she likes. She’d better bring her illegitimate child with her, I don’t suppose your mother wants him.’

Aunt Julie’s bark was worse than her bite. Perhaps, indeed, she had no real bite. When James next went to Sindon Lodge some three weeks later Mirabel was settled in as if she had lived there all her life, Oliver was on the hearthrug where he had usurped Palmerston’s place and Aunt Julie was wearing Mirabel’s Christmas present.

She hardly spoke to James while her great-niece was in the room. She lay back in her armchair with her eyes closed and though the young woman’s clothes she wore gave to her appearance a kind of bizarre mockery of youth, you could see now that she was very old. Recent upheavals had aged her. Her face looked as if it were made of screwed-up brown paper. But when Mirabel went away – was compelled to leave them by Oliver’s insistent demands for his tea – Aunt Julie seemed to revive. She opened her eyes and said to James in her sharpest and most offhand tone: ‘This is the last time you’ll come here, I daresay.’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘I’ve made my will, that’s why, and you’re not in it.’

She cocked a distorted thumb in the direction of the door. ‘I’ve left the house and the furniture and all I’ve got to her. And a bit to someone else we both know.’

‘Who?’ said James.

‘Never you mind. It’s not you and it’s none of your business.’ A curious look came into Aunt Julie’s eyes. ‘What I’ve done is leave my money to two people I can’t stand and who don’t like me. You think that’s silly, don’t you? They’ve both sucked up to me and danced attendance on me and told a lot of lies about caring for me. Well, I’m tired, I’m sick of it. They can have what they want and I’ll never again have to see that look on their faces.’

‘What look?’

‘A kind of greedy pleading. The kind of look no one ought to have unless she’s starving. You don’t know what I’m talking about, do you? You’re as clever as they come but you don’t know what life is, not yet you don’t. How could you?’

The old woman closed her eyes and there was silence in which the topmost log crumpled and sank into the heart of the fire with a rush of sparks, and Palmerston strode out from where he had taken refuge from Oliver, rubbed himself against James’s legs and settled down in the red glow to wash himself. Suddenly Aunt Julie spoke.

‘I didn’t want you corrupted, can you understand that? I didn’t want to spoil the only one who means more than a row of pins to me. But I don’t know . . . If I wasn’t too old to stand the fuss there’d be I’d go back on what I’ve done and leave the house to you. Or your mother, she’s a nice woman.’