‘But how can you possibly see from there?’ Miss Docker realized. ‘You want to take a proper look.’

Oh, but I have seen, Mrs Lillie would have protested, if the object of her protest had not reached her side. Are truth and goodness the knouts from which we suffer most? She had even known such weapons turn at last on those who wield them.

‘It’s not all that much to me,’ Miss Docker claimed. ‘You are the one.’

In the uncertain light, the snapshot seemed to suggest the reverse. It was Miss Docker’s potato shape which dominated the photograph. Protecting the sick man from what? In his tweed cap, of a style which had never altered, flat on the top, Tom ignored, as rocks will ignore the arabesques of lichen. Only his wife knew that rocks will open at a touch. Driving in the Pincio at dusk, she floated while he sat Horses had always terrified her – those flaring nostrils in the carved heads. Oh, my hair, she cried, as the branches of trees matched their dew against her spray of diamonds. Her long amethyst sleeves tangled with the shadows of trees. Wheels tilting at a corner. Supposing they should overturn? But he steadied her as always by putting out an arm. In age it had been Miss Docker who put out an arm to Tom. She herself, Mrs Lillie saw, was an old head blurred on its shoulders by perpetual motion.

‘Would you like to keep it? As a memento?’ Miss Docker menaced.

Mrs Lillie was aware of the avalanche of kindness, waiting at her elbow, to engulf.

‘No,’ she answered. ‘Thank you.’

‘It was only a thought,’ Miss Docker said. ‘One can only offer.’

And really she had so much to do. There were lots of other pictures.

‘Oh, this,’ she shouted, ‘will kill you!’

Flying at several ladies at once.

‘This is Me! As Aladdin! At a ball!’

Her legs had been quite remarkable.

‘I could kick up my heels with the best,’ she screamed. ‘At the Charleston. And all that.’

Here we go, oh-de-doh! The Chinese Room reeled. At least the drunken cabinet – genuine lacquer, too – had learnt to waggle in its day. A brass jardinière, tarnished now, shouldered what there was of light. Fringes drizzled their sour music from the lamps. Broken springs bulged in bass.

But Mrs Lillie, she had been set on a sea of amethyst music. How it swelled, and swirled, in ever rosier shawls. Once his shirt front had broken open, and there they were together on their knees, laughing for the unimportance of a vanished pearl.

Again Miss Docker rummaged in her box.

‘This. And this,’ she clattered.

‘And that one?’ asked an old lady whose life suddenly depended on it.

‘That is private. Somebody who died,’ Miss Docker mumbled.

And put it away.

Somebody who died! Was death so very private? Mrs Lillie almost laughed.

Instead she had stood there smiling the morning Tom died. Miss Docker had come in. Miss Docker was sitting beside the bed, her legs apart, on the lid of that commode which somebody had lent.