‘I think,’ Mark said, ‘that Grandfather hopes you will edit the memoirs, sir.’

‘I’ll … Of course,’ the Colonel said after an infinitesimal pause. ‘I’ll be delighted; if you think you can trust me.’

‘Trust you. Implicitly. Implicitly. One other thing. Do you mind, Mark?’

‘Of course not, Grandfather. Nurse, shall we have a word?’

Nurse Kettle followed Mark out of the room. They stood together on a dark landing at the head of a wide stairway.

‘I don’t think,’ Mark said, ‘that it will be much longer.’

‘Wonderful, though, how he’s perked up for the Colonel.’

‘He’d set his will on it. I think,’ Mark said, ‘that he will now relinquish his life.’

Nurse Kettle agreed: ‘Funny how they can hang on and funny how they will give up.’

In the hall below a door opened and light flooded up the stairs. Mark looked over the banister and saw the enormously broad figure of his grandmother. Her hand flashed as it closed on the stair rail. She began heavily to ascend. He could hear her laboured breathing.

‘Steady does it, Gar,’ he said.

Lady Lacklander paused and looked up. ‘Ha!’ she said, ‘it’s the Doctor, is it?’ Mark grinned at the sardonic overtone.

She arrived on the landing. The train of her old velvet dinner-dress followed her and the diamonds which every evening she absentmindedly stuck about her enormous bosom burned and winked as it rose and fell.

‘Good evening, Kettle,’ she panted. ‘Good of you to come and help my poor old boy. How is he, Mark? Has, Maurice Cartarette arrived? Why are you both closeted together out here?’

‘The Colonel’s here, Gar. Grandfather wanted to have a word privately with him, so Nurse and I left them together.’

‘Something about those damned memoirs,’ said Lady Lacklander vexedly. ‘I suppose, in that case, I’d better not go in.’

‘I don’t think they’ll be long.’

There was a large Jacobean chair on the landing. He pulled it forward. She let herself down into it, shuffled her astonishingly small feet out of a pair of old slippers and looked critically at them.

‘Your father,’ she said, ‘has gone to sleep in the drawing-room muttering that he would like to see Maurice.’ She shifted her great bulk towards Nurse Kettle. ‘Now, before you settle to your watch, you kind soul,’ she said, ‘you won’t mind saving my mammoth legs a journey. Jog down to the drawing-room, rouse my lethargic son, tell him the Colonel’s here and make him give you a drink and a sandwich. Um?’

‘Yes, of course, Lady Lacklander,’ said Nurse Kettle, and descended briskly. ‘Wanted to get rid of me, she thought, ‘but it was tactfully done.’

‘Nice woman, Kettle,’ Lady Lacklander grunted. ‘She knows I wanted to be rid of her. Mark, what is it that’s making your grandfather unhappy?’

‘Is he unhappy, Gar?’