I walked about the flat from room to room, examining everything. Claustrophobics are better when they’re on the move. One good thing about the place was that the rooms were big and the ceilings quite high, though lower than on the upper floors. The bedroom was the least subterranean and the top few inches of its window were above the top of the wall that divided the back area from the garden. I was thankful for that because there I was to sleep, and in this old lady’s high bed with wooden headboard carved with ridges and shelves and designed apparently to stop you sitting up in bed, still less reading, and paneled wooden footboard on which to stub your toes. The clothes cupboard, which I didn’t know then should be called a wardrobe, was the kind nervous children imagine things will come out of in the night. I was too old for that but still I didn’t like this wardrobe, its blackness, its panels with carvings on the bits in between, its clawed feet like the paws of a very old arthritic lion; and I very much disliked the kind of crest thing that surmounted its front and which looked to me in the dim half-light, and many times later after I knew what it really was, like snakes and scorpions engaged in some dreadful struggle, inextricably interwined.

I unpacked my cases. A great many wire hangers, the kind they put your clothes on at the dry cleaner’s, were on the rail inside the wardrobe. They jangled with a ringing noise like discordant bells, not only when you opened the doors but if you so much as touched the wardrobe when you passed it. I hung up my clothes, I put my sponge bag in the bathroom (claw-footed bath, the tub iron-stained, no shower, overhead toilet flush with a chain). There was linoleum on the floor, something else I didn’t know the name of until Beryl enlightened me, probably at the same time as she told me the wardrobe was a wardrobe and that I could buy lightbulbs “fit for a human person not wanting to lose her eyesight” round the corner at the supermarket.