Miss Docker remembered, she remembered in the Chinese Room of the Sundown Home for Old People, her hands shuffling the photographs, her jaws munching as she masticated all that was bitterest in memory.

‘Surely the photographs are not all finished?’ Somebody was kind enough to inquire.

‘Oh dear, no!’ Miss Docker replied. ‘Nothing is ever finished.’

As for Mrs Lillie, she had got up by stages out of her chair, and was hobbling and trembling her way towards the thread-bare stairs.

‘What is up with her?’ Miss Docker asked.

‘I expect she is turning in. The past has been too much for her,’ her friend Mrs Hibble explained.

Miss Docker appeared somewhat mollified, though nothing would atone for the incident by which Tom Lillie had eluded her. Only in her mind had she watched his polished casket slide shakily behind the curtain.

‘Won’t you show us another?’ the old voices continued to beg; even Mrs Hibble’s joined in.

Then Miss Docker gleamed.

‘Will anybody recognize in this,’ she asked, flourishing a faded picture, ‘the true portrait of Little Me?’

Mrs Hibble got up very slowly, and when she was in the shape of a half-open knife, advanced to make sure she would not miss anything of what Miss Docker had to reveal.

Certainly the baby naked on the rug was horribly like its exhibitor. So Mrs Hibble saw.

‘I was a bed-wetter too, they say,’ Miss Docker informed.

Several of the dim faces recoiled.

‘Somewhere I read, I believe in a medical journal,’ she had grown very grave, ‘that bed-wetting is a sign of parental discord.’

The old heads shook in disbelief.

‘But the funny part of it is,’ Miss Docker began to explode ‘ – if it isn’t a joke you’ll tell me – I was a, I was a norphan!.’ Here she fairly shrieked.

3

Almost all the life of the Sundown Home was conducted in the cement millionaire’s Chinese Room. Certainly during the fortnight of spring, when the blossom burst out of quiescent branches, and sap seemed momentarily to moisten the driest of the talcum-powdered skins, the old bodies would stumble through the damp grass and sun themselves against espaliered walls. Always returning to the Chinese tomb. It was not that the mansion failed to offer a variety of communal rooms, but this was closest to the telephone, and even though it seldom rang, closeness inspired arthritic limbs with hope.

Sometimes Miss Docker – more athletic – would jump up and drop a few pennies in the box. She would ring the rectory.

‘The Reverend Wakeman, is it?’ Miss Docker would ask. ‘It is a pity,’ she said, ‘but this evening I shall have to miss my Bible class. Thought I would inform you. A poor soul is in need of attention. I will sit with her,’ she said, ‘while I have the strength.’

‘That is, indeed, charitable, Miss Docker,’ the rector’s voice replied. ‘I commend you for your Christian act.’

He could have been searching for further words. And Miss Docker waited. But he did not find them. She was dis-appointed.