Her white body, creamed of all its down, only the sable fleece at her groin. Long and slender, like something carved from a bone, but full-breasted, the little sweets of the nipples dilute-rose. A blue-green shadow reflected on the whiteness, something undersea.

She stared at her body, what she could make out of it portioned by the mirror, trying to know it as her own.

Rachaela had never seen her mother’s nakedness. Her sagging defeated frame had stayed swathed in zippered day clothes, and nighties and tent-like dressing-gowns. And once the knock on the bathroom door and her mother’s harsh frightened voice, ‘You can’t come in.’ Her mother had been scandalized that Rachaela slept naked. In the same way she had been scandalized at the frequent hair washing, and Rachaela’s habitual lateness at her places of work. All the same, all condemned.

Her daughter was a being from Venus.

She had bought Rachaela sensible nightdresses and marked the shampoo bottle and set the alarm clock in her own bedroom to wake her so that she might come in and shake Rachaela awake. ‘They won’t stand for it. Do you know you used almost the whole bottle when you washed your hair? Why don’t you get it cut and set?’

A lily stood up against Rachaela’s navel, its green glass stem bisecting her pubic fleece.

She turned from the mirror and got naked into the bed.

She had placed a chair under the doorknob.

This was foolish. He had seen her.

She did not sleep for a long time, and twice muted steps went through the passageway, and she thought of the great cat slipping past, brushing the door with its flank, something dead in its mouth.

Rachaela was standing at the base of the tower.

There was no light, but glass lilies grew between the treads of the stair, which was scarlet, moist, littered with feathers.

He stretched down his hand to her.

She would not take his hand.

She climbed up and up the tower. The ascent was endless. All the while some terror was tight in her throat. She meant to reach him and was afraid to do so.

At last she came into a wide round room under the cone of the roof. To her amazement there were windows of clear glass. They showed the woods, the cliff and the sea.

Adamus, if so she must call him, was not there. The room was vacant. And Rachaela began to cry.

❖

The picture in the corridor window was a dreadful one, a lion slaughtering a sheep, and its vivid colours were strewn everywhere by the excluded sunlight.

Rachaela was searching the house aimlessly.

The corridor was very long and it seemed to her it led to the library, but she could not recall for certain. Sylvian would be busy in the library, crossing out the words, or Alice would be there, scratching with a hat pin at the globe.