‘No,’ Mrs Lillie answered faintly.

But her skin was unquenchable. It glowed still through the dingy light with the secrets of experience.

‘Later on I used to help you turn him. I don’t know how you would have managed. He was that heavy. A big man.’

A no-hoper, Millicent Embery overheard before becoming engaged to him. But his shoulders were magnificent, his head the rubbing from a Roman plaque. At least on the mother’s side Tom Lillie passed the genealogical test, though did not come up to the Emberys, of course. What to do with Tom, provided Millicent married him – that had been the subject of discussion. Till Mrs Embery overnight, turned him into a landscape gardener, and Tom never looked back. He was so rude to his clients, they accepted his dismissal of the golden cypress, they had never dared refuse the rocks with which he strewed their suburban lawns.

‘I was afraid at first,’ Miss Docker meandered, ‘I must admit, Mrs Lillie, your aquiline nose put me off. Do you care for it yourself?’

‘I have never thought about it,’ Mrs Lillie answered.

Millicent Lillie had taken her beauty for granted. It had been so indisputable, she had never analysed the details.

‘A nose can cut, you know,’ Miss Docker accused. ‘He, though, he was bluff – I think I have heard them call it. Yes. A lovely man. His speech was gone by then. But does speech make all that difference?’

Mrs Hibble laughed, and glanced deliberately at her friend. But Mrs Lillie did not notice.

‘I would turn him in the end on my own. Like he was a baby.’

So that several of the old ladies grew fascinated by the nurse’s hands.

As for Miss Docker, she swaddled and coddled still. She loved her log. Which was all that was left of the man who had blown an inheritance.

In the sordid little house to which they were reduced. So Mrs Lillie remembered.

‘You, my dear, never had the strength,’ Miss Docker reminded.

No, indeed. She remembered how Miss Docker’s strength had rocked the fibro. She remembered the smells and stains of sickness.

Even at her apogee, Millicent Lillie suspected it was age which evolved the figures of the dance. The hieroglyphs on ancient stonework might lull her back into a sense of security. But only briefly, and only false. So her aigrette trembled, long before the palsy overtook her, and the single strand of diamonds that she wore almost severed her head from her throat What the deuce, asked Tom, kissing her eyelids, kissing her throat. It was, of course, too irrational, not to say perverse, to explain. So she joined her mouth to his. And drank his kisses, drunkenly, which smelled of claret. As the dahabiah plunged them deeper awash in the uniform moonlight of Egypt, they were sculptured in the same marble, and at the same time deliriously dissolved. There were the days, however, when the dust would play upon the deck, reaching out from the eroded shore. Then her lips tasted of the desert.