They negotiated the corridor, came along the landing, went into the other passage, to Rachaela’s door.

The house might have been vacant.

Ruth looked round at the blue-and-green bedchamber.

‘It’s nice. What’s the window of?’

‘The temptation of Eve.’

On the bed, packed, sat Rachaela’s bag. Her boots stood by the hearth, for walking.

Ruth still wore her shoes from school. That was a blessing.

Ruth said, ‘It will be nice to go home.’

Rachaela saw the flat, Ruth’s area dismantled, and all her things in boxes. At least nothing had been given away, not even the clothes for Oxfam.

She’s trying to keep on my fine side, Rachaela thought. She doesn’t think of the flat as home. Perhaps not anywhere. She thought, Christ, what will become of her? And she visualized Ruth borne screaming into a tiled tunnel by men in white coats.

‘Ruth, you must stay here now. Don’t go out of the room. Do you need the bathroom?’

‘No, Mummy.’

How in God’s name had they managed that, in the attic?

‘I’m going to go down and see if anyone’s about on the ground floor. I won’t be more than ten or fifteen minutes. And then, we’re leaving.’

‘Yes,’ said Ruth. She sat down in the chair, where once Adamus had sat.

‘Be ready, Ruth.’

Ruth nodded, and swung her legs. They did not quite reach the floor.

Rachaela went out again. She walked along the corridor softly. She felt a peculiar buoyancy.

On the landing she paused. All was quiet. The house murmured, muttered to itself. The sea sounded.

In their nests the Scarabae kept close.

Down in the hall all the lamps burned, the ruby lamp, the lights of the drawing room.

Rachaela went into the drawing room, the dining room.

She opened wide the door to the conservatory, and so the door to the garden.

The air was full of scent, roses and jasmine and the salt of the ocean. She experienced a sudden tearing in her, nostalgia for something soon to be past. She had never truly understood what she felt for this house.

The yew was very black. The cat lay beneath, morphing itself into putrescence and bone. And out there, Anna and Dorian and Peter, Alice and Sylvian, rocked in the tide.

And behind her in the tower, Adamus.

Adamus.

Her feet on the lawn, she turned and stared towards the cone of the tower’s roof, and in that second a great chord of sound was struck, as if upon her own body, shivering up from her soles into her spleen, her heart and cranium.

It was like a metaphysical note, like the breaking string in The Cherry Orchard. Did it likewise portend some loss, some irreversible cruelty of fate—

Rachaela threw off the cloak of sensation which had settled bat-like upon her.

She ran back into the house, across the rooms, the hall, and quickly climbed the stair.

On the landing she paused again. Again she heard only the silence of faint noises.