She greeted us with a hug: she was alone except for the servants and Eddie, her younger son, who lived with her because there was no institution that could contain him. The first thing she did was ask me if I wanted to take a bath before eating, because I must be exhausted after the overnight flight. I was exhausted, and famished: the nausea and disgust had passed. Florence took me upstairs to the guest room, and one of the servants left my suitcase on the straps of the luggage stand. The wallpaper was of thorny roses, like the ones in the garden. From the window I could see the damp street and people walking quickly, freezing in the February cold. The bathtub, to my surprise, was already full. Florence took care of those details that, in my house, my mother had never learned how to organize. When I started to feel cold, I got out of the water and put on a simple black dress, long and loose, and a pair of moccasin boots. The house was warm and I didn’t need anything else.

We had a somewhat uncomfortable lunch, the three of us. Florence listened to my plans to study at the Warburg Institute and Cambridge; she said only that it was all arranged, I could start classes in two weeks, and, when the time came, begin the regular school year. We didn’t talk about Juan, but we did talk about Eddie. While we were downstairs eating, he was upstairs tied to his bed, because he would try to bite himself, and he’d already managed to destroy his wrists with his teeth. Florence kept the secret of exactly what she had done with her younger son, but she told the basic story because, she thought, Juan’s arrival had been a wake-up call about her arrogance, a way of showing her that neither she nor anyone else could influence the Darkness’s decisions. By training her son to be a medium, she had lain waste to his psyche. Eddie was crazy and he was dangerous, to himself and to others. She regretted it and her pain was sincere, because she loved Eddie desperately.

Stephen didn’t let me rest after we ate. When they cleared the plates and Florence ordered the tea, he told me we’re going right out, you have to see the city, it’s wonderful. The rest of the country is worthless, but London is the center of the world.

Florence didn’t stop us. She didn’t like the company of young people like us. We reminded her of what she had lost as a teenager, when she had to take over the Order. In her mind, we had no responsibilities. Stephen kissed me in the doorway of the house, under the umbrella, and with the tip of his tongue put a tab of acid on my palate. It’s only a fourth, he told me, to see if you have a bad trip. It’s good to fly low your first time. And we climbed into his moss-colored Lotus Elan—a convertible, even though, he would say, you can only put the top down three days a year on this damn island. He was exaggerating, of course, but not much.