In the dressing-table drawers were the photographs – Louise, Mark, Anabel and Claud from babyhood to adolescence. He turned them over. Sometimes something was written on the back – ‘Mark in Berlin’ or ‘Picnic near Helston’. In a good-looking family Claud’s beauty was outstanding. He was like Matilda, but beautiful. He put the photographs aside, feeling that he knew Claud, would not care for Louise, would like to fuck Anabel, be bored by Tom and really dislike Mark who had a priggish expression. He searched for letters but was not rewarded. He put the snapshots back. There was a space in the drawer where probably Tom’s letters had lain – now destroyed? No sign of any in Matilda’s writing. At the back of the drawer a yellowed postcard of Trafalgar Square. ‘Come at the same time. I’ll take you on to the party. It’s in Guildford Street.’ No signature, but Hugh was reminded of the voice on the telephone which he had heard, ‘You will take the usual train.’ The postcard was in an authoritative script. He put it back.

Hugh prowled, felt the bed, a deep mattress. He examined her books. There had been a poetry phase. Then, rather surprisingly, the Russians: Chekov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy. Then Camus and Sartre. The flyleaf of each book was initialled and dated. She had tried Bertrand Russell but not got far, had read Thomas Mann, left Jane Austen untouched but managed Shaw. Graham Greene and Muriel Spark were read and reread. In Ivy Compton-Burnett she had written on a flyleaf, ‘needs more concentration than Dostoevsky.’ In Margaret Drabble’s first novel, in Claud’s hand, ‘Darling Mama, try this, she knows about your kind of despair.’

Hugh opened Matilda’s drawers. The clothes were not the clothes of a woman who felt the need of sexy knickers. She wore Indian cotton shirts as nightdresses, Jaeger wool tights in winter. The clothes were rather worn, unglamorous. In the middle dressing-table drawer a note: ‘Have put jewels in the bank, listed for each of you. Don’t quarrel – take what’s given. I flogged the pearls.’ That wouldn’t make much difference with Matilda dead, Hugh felt. There was an envelope with a bent corner as though it had been stuck in the corner of the mirror. Hugh tried it. The crease fitted. He went downstairs and put the kettle on to steam the envelope open. Inside on a plain sheet of paper dated the day he had met her was a note:

Darling Louise, Mark, Anabel and Claud. I have had enough. Please have me cremated and scatter my ashes over the stream. I love you all. I am in full possession of my faculties. My Will is at the bank. Goodbye. I love you. Don’t feel guilty. Your loving Mother.