It was the medium who explained in her corpse voice. ‘She said she had seen her own double in the park.’

‘But that was six months ago,’ he burst out. ‘That was in April!’

‘No, she saw her own double yesterday afternoon, her image walking in the garden. And she dared to speak to it. Who can tell what your own death will tell you when you dare to address it?’

He ran away from them then, out of the house. He hailed a taxi and in a shaking whisper asked the driver to take him to where Zoe lived. All the lights were on in her windows. He rang the bell, rang it again and again. Then, while the lights still blazed but she didn’t come down, he hammered on the door with his fists, calling her name. When he knew she wasn’t going to come, that he had lost her and her image, her double and her, for ever, he sank down on the doorstep and wept.

The taxi driver, returning along the street in search of a fare, supposed him to be drunk, and learning his address from the broken mutterings, took him home.

The Venus Fly Trap

AS SOON AS Daphne had taken off her hat and put it on Merle’s bed, Merle picked it up and rammed it on her own yellow curls. It was a red felt hat and by chance it matched Merle’s red dress.

‘It’s a funny thing, dear,’ said Merle, looking at herself in the dressing-table mirror, ‘but anyone seeing us two – any outsider, I mean – would never think that I was the single one and you’d had all those husbands and children.’

‘I only had two husbands and three children,’ said Daphne.

‘You know what I mean,’ said Merle, and Daphne, standing beside her friend, had to admit that she did. Merle was so big, so pink and overflowing and female, while she – well, she had given up pretending she was anything but a little dried-up widow, seventy years old and looking every day of it.

Merle took off the hat and placed it beside the doll whose yellow satin skirts concealed her nightdress and her bag of hair rollers. ‘I’ll show you the flat and then we’ll have a sherry and put our feet up. I got some of that walnut brown in. You see I haven’t forgotten your tastes even after forty years.’

Daphne didn’t say it was dry sherry she had then, and still, preferred. She trotted meekly after Merle. She was just beginning to be aware of the intense heat. Clouds of warmth seemed to breathe out of the embossed wallpaper and up through the lush furry carpets.

‘I really am thrilled about you coming to live in this block, dear. Ths is my little spare room. I like to think I can put up a friend if I want. Not that many of them come. Between you and me, dear, people rather resent my having done so well for myself and all on my own initiative. People are so mean-spirited, I’ve noticed that as I’ve got older. That’s why I was so thrilled when you agreed to come here. I mean, when someone took my advice.’