Cheta served them. She was a female Michael, clad in an ordinary dark dress with a brooch at the collar. Its white stones looked real. Her grey hair was dressed in a bun low on her neck as if to show subservience, and her shoes were flat. Her eyes were just like Michael’s.

Michael and Cheta were not so old as Anna and Stephan, yet they were old, had a dusty attic quality. They were Anna and Stephan come down in the world.

Candles lit the long table, laid with only three places. Above, lightless, a broken chandelier, snagging firelight from the grate. On the mantel was a golden clock, not ticking, stopped conceivably for decades.

The meal was indeed simple enough. After the pie, served with presumably home-grown carrots and fried cabbage, was dished up a dessert of sliced fruit in an alcoholic juice.

A cheeseboard came and biscuits baked by Cheta, and by another unseen one, Maria.

What relation were Anna and Stephan to each other? Did they bear some relation to the servants, for there was a similarity in all the faces. Rachaela found them disconcertingly familiar. Did this mean that she perceived, too, a resemblance to herself?

She did not want to ask these intimate questions. It had been difficult enough to ask what she had. And they had not answered—or there truly was no answer. Maybe their elderly hearts had only creaked out for her youth.

They were fascinated by her. She saw that.

The little questions they plied her with in turn, to do with the food, what food she liked, if she wished for the salt, were popped into her like polished coins into a magical box, to elicit her responses. They watched her with their bright cruel eyes. They would eat her alive. She only had to be, to feed them. They ate the rabbit with fastidious sharp snaps.

The conversation had been slight.

They were no conversationalists. They had come down here to feed.

As Stephan picked about amid the presumably town-bought cheeses, a curtain rustled, a door opened, and another thin old man came wafting in, weightless and virtually silent, with a book beneath his arm.

He crossed the carpet and slid to the table, but not to dine. He stared at Rachaela greedily, craning a little.

‘Eric, here is Rachaela,’ said Anna.

The eyes of Eric were the eyes of Anna and Stephan. His crinkled mummy’s face showed nothing, the thin dry lips were not parted. Eric made a tiny sound, like a hiccup almost, and glided away and out of another curtained door, which seemed for a moment to open on a garden.

‘You mustn’t mind them,’ said Anna. ‘Not all of us are chatty. Eric is a thinker, a reader.’

The door curtain moved again and two old women in fusty beaded dresses blew into the room.

They too swam to the table. They had the eyes.